Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary is in the twilight zone. He has to defend the highest personal income tax burden in the developed world. It is a tough job to do.
When the parliamentary secretary talked about the so-called tax savings he was including new spending transfers like the child tax benefit. The government will be sending out cheques to people and calling them the child tax benefit. That is fine but it is a spending increase and he is calling it a tax cut. That is not honest bookkeeping.
The parliamentary secretary wants us to ignore the $29 billion CPP tax grab. He says that is off-budget. It is in an Al Goresque lock box or something. That is nonsense. Those moneys have always been fungible. We know that money going into the CPP has been spent as though it were in general revenues. It is a tax that must be paid by Canadians mandated by the government.
What the parliamentary secretary really misses is the fact that even with some modest steps forward on the tax front, the government is allowing $58 billion to be gobbled up by new spending above and beyond the rate of growth in population and inflation. That is a missed opportunity of $58 billion which can and should be delivered to working families in the form of far more dramatic tax relief. This would enable us to increase our productivity and our standard of living.
The money could go toward the national debt but he did not even talk about that. He said that we could not reduce the debt until the deficit was eliminated. He is right. The government took four years to eliminate the deficit. According to Dale Orr of WEFA, Don Drummond of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, a former associate deputy minister of finance and the member's own colleague from Markham, we are now going back into a deficit.
Last October his colleague said that there could be as much as a $2.6 billion planning deficit. He did not address the fact that we are at risk of going back into deficit territory in the out years of the current fiscal plan because spending is not under control. That is the challenge and that is the question the government needs to answer.