Mr. Speaker, there was a program that my friends and I used to watch in the 1950s and 1960s. It was called The Twilight Zone . The member for Calgary Southeast probably never had a chance to watch it, but he sounded very much like that.
I do not where to begin but I will focus on a couple of areas. The hon. member talks about the debt. The government is paying down debt faster than any other industrialized nation. The member conveniently forgets that one cannot attack the debt until one eliminates the deficit, which we did. We started that as soon as we came into office.
The member knows that federal government spending is at the lowest level in terms of GDP since the early 1950s. We will continue that moderating approach. The member talks about possible deficits. There is no evidence of any deficits. The Minister of Finance has budgeted and planned so that we have fiscal cushions to absorb changes in the economy.
What got me the most was when the member said Canadians were not really getting a tax cut. He said the $100 billion tax cut would not be a tax cut for most Canadians. He said part of it would, I admit that.
I will give some examples. We will ask Canadians if they think this is a tax cut. One earner families of four earning $40,000 paid about $3,325 in federal income taxes last year. This year they will pay about $1,100 less. That is a 32% saving. The saving will increase to 59% by the year 2004. I ask the hon. member if that is not a tax saving. I think it is.
Last year two earner families of four earning $60,000 paid about $5,700 in federal income taxes. Next year they will pay over $1,000 less, a tax saving of 18%. Those savings would increase to 34% by the year 2004. I take that as a tax decrease. In other words, Canadians will pay a lot less tax as a result of the October 2000 economic and fiscal update. I challenge the member to refute that those are not tax savings. Those members talk about re-indexation until they are blue in the face. They ask why we did not re-index the tax system. We have done that.
The member talked about the Canada pension plan. He knows full well that the Canadian pension plan is a contribution based pension scheme and that those funds do not go anywhere near consolidated revenue. He knows that and yet he continues to talk about it as being a tax. Would the member reconsider his statements and come clean with Canadians?