Mr. Speaker, during this year's election campaign the Prime Minister told Canadians that the Conservative Party was wrong when we said we could have both increased spending on priority areas and lower taxes. The Prime Minister said:
Stephen Harper says he can do it all, he says he can protect health care, increase transfers to the provinces, he can eliminate debt, he can cut taxes. I'll tell you something, his numbers don't add up. They're not even close.
Now we know that the surplus has rolled in at $9.1 billion rather than the $1.9 billion that the Minister of Finance forecast. So much for Liberal math. How ironic that only four months after the Minister of Finance said there is no room for tax cuts, now he is proposing them.
We could not agree more. The OECD says Canada's tax burden remains the heaviest in NAFTA. It is time to cut taxes. We were right all along.