Mr. Speaker, that is classic Liberal doublespeak. Of course, the government ran around when it brought down the budget in, I think it was 2001, and announced that it was bringing in all these tax cuts. It sounded very good, but when we looked at the budget very closely, we found out that what the government was announcing and what Canadians were actually getting were two very different things.
The Liberals said in 2001 that they were going to reindex the tax system. In other words, they got rid of the problem called bracket creep. That meant they were effectively cancelling planned tax increases that occurred every year. In other words, they are saying that because they are no longer going to tax people more and more every year, that is actually a tax cut. That is basically how the Liberals accounted for it. Really, is that not the whole problem? Is that not the problem when they try and mislead Canadians?
I referred to that a bit in my speech, where the government says on the one hand it is going to improve the financial management of the nation and then sets up the sponsorship program. It is cutting the comptrollership function so there are fewer controls on spending. It set all these other things up.
When it comes to tax cuts, the Liberals say they are going to cut people's taxes, when it turns out that really they are just not going to raise them any more, at least not as fast as they used to. I think there is a big difference between cutting taxes and not raising taxes down the road.
The other point, when it came to the alleged $100 billion tax cut, is that when the Liberals were counting cuts to employment insurance premiums, they were not counting increases to Canada pension plan premiums, which wiped out all the cuts that were being made to EI. CPP increases were greater than EI reductions so that in the end that was really a wash. In fact it was a minor tax increase.
The final thing was that the government is actually counting a social program, the child tax benefit, as a tax cut. The Auditor General took the government to task for that and said it could not do that. A tax cut is when there is money left in people's pockets, not when it is taken from some, put into a social program and given to others, a different group of people. It is rather obvious that is not a tax cut. That is a program, but it was counted as a tax cut.
When we net it all out, there was a very minor tax cut of around $45 billion, but all that means is that we still have the highest taxes we have ever had. What it would really do is lower taxes back to the point of roughly where they were when the government came into power in 1993. Canadians are certainly not better off when it comes to taxes under this government.