Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today on Motion No. 293. I do want to say that I have some sympathy for the private member's motion of the hon. member for Dartmouth. The sympathy I have is that I think there is a need for lower taxes in the country, lower taxes for a lot of Canadians, for hard working Canadian families. I also have some sympathy for her ideas that copyright and patent law need to be protected. We are in agreement with that. Intellectual property is an important part of property. Property needs to be rewarded. When people have ideas and want to put them out to the public, they need some kind of protection. We are supportive of that idea although it has caused some disruption in certain sectors, such as schools that want to photocopy material and have difficulty with that area.
In general I would say that Canadians, not just Canadian artists, are overtaxed. All Canadians are overtaxed. If we were to ask hard working Canadian families about it, they would certainly agree with that.
One of the reasons for this is that we have seen a tremendous amount of spending increases by the Liberal government over the last several years. In fact, from 2001-02 to 2004-05, spending rises from $125 billion to $150 billion. That is just on direct and indirect program spending. Then when we add on the interest we as a society have to pay for overspending in the past 30 years, we get into the range of $190 billion.
That interest alone causes me a great deal of difficulty. In fact, Canadian families, and Canadian artists or whoever, happen to be affected by this, with 21ยข out of every tax dollar they send to Ottawa going just to pay interest on debt. That is not good enough. That is money we would have in our pockets to spend as we would like if we had that opportunity, and the past two governments did not commit the sins that brought that about.
I recall the Liberal government coming to power in 1993 when the national debt was $508 billion, a horrific number, but it ran that up to $583 billion before the Canadian public and others around the world started to get concerned about countries hitting the wall: New Zealand, Mexico and even Canada. Our credit rating was being downgraded by Moody's and others. The message got through in about 1995-96 that we had to do something about it. What did we do? The government actually did reduce spending for a couple of years, but how did it reduce it? It reduced spending by cutting transfers to the provinces. That was the biggest area of spending cuts that it made. It was an easy target, 9% in its own backyard--