Mr. Speaker, I agree that it is not a matter of what the government spends in the necessary areas. For example, we need more spending in health care. We need to maintain our social programs. We are not talking about the urgent needs of Canadians.
The child benefit is a spending program delivered through the tax system. I would like to touch on the point the hon. member mentioned about $100 billion in tax relief. There is some sleight of hand in this number if we take all the minuses into account: the minus $3.2 billion for social spending over five years, the minus $29.5 billion over five years for increased CPP premium hikes; and the minus $20.7 billion over five years for cancelled tax hikes in indexation. What do we come up with? Not $100 billion tax relief but something just over $53 billion. That is a little more than half what the government is talking about.
We need to have the numbers on the table so that we know where we stand in both the income and the spending of the government, not the kind of sleight of hand that it uses to win an election. That is what the bill is about. It is to implement something that was put in place as an election strategy.