My friend has obviously missed part of the speech because he comes in and says they have delivered the largest tax cuts in history. I would point out to my friend that this myth has been so thoroughly debunked by Don Drummond in his recent report. It needs no further response.
The government is deceiving Canadians again. It said that low and middle income tax cuts will now form a major part of the government's agenda. That is what it did in accepting these amendments into the throne speech. It no sooner did that than both the finance minister and the Prime Minister said that it was not a priority. They were not going to do this. They had other things that were more important.
It is one thing for me to make these arguments and I have made them many times in the 11 years I have been in this place. People will say that I have a political axe to grind and that I have another agenda. Well, if they do not believe me, then I ask them to look at the reports of people like Don Drummond, a former deputy finance minister, now a chief economist for the TD Bank Financial Group. There is a recent report from the C.D. Howe Institute that talks about how Canada has fallen further and further behind on the issue of corporate taxation.
I am sure my friend, the member for Edmonton--Leduc, our industry critic, will touch on this down the road when he speaks later today. This has a direct impact on jobs. I will talk about that later if I have time. I guess I have unlimited time so I might be here all day.
The point I was trying to make is that there are experts out there, people who have studied these things for years, who have become truly alarmed at Canada's diminishment in the world in terms of its economy. This is what I find frustrating and I have touched on this briefly before.
Canada has a heritage of being a leader in the world in so many areas. We have lost that heritage. We had a great military coming out of the World War II. That has been diminished. We had a great authority in the world as a foreign policy power. We have lost that. We had a tremendous reputation as an economic leader. We were one of the Asian tigers before there was an Asian tiger. We were one of the great leaders in the world when it came to a productive economy.
For some reason we seem to be accepting today that we can no longer do that. I do not buy that. I think we could be a world leader again, just like Sweden; Ireland; Australia, which is shooting ahead; and the Netherlands. Luxembourg has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. In fact, I think it has the highest per capita income in the world. How did it do that? Did it do it because it has oil in the ground? No. Did it do it because it has really high taxes? No. It does it because it is smart about its public policy decisions. It has smart taxation levels that attract investment. That is what we have to do in Canada.
If we do not do that, we will repel investment. Investment goes to wherever it gets the best return. If it is not in Canada, that means we lose jobs, opportunities and the revenue ultimately that is necessary to fund our social programs. We cannot continue to do that. We have all these experts today who are saying that Canada is in serious trouble, that we are falling further and further behind.
One of the things that we run into, and I bet some of my colleagues ran into this when they were out during the break in their riding, is that the high value of the Canadian dollar is hammering businesses today. We export so much of what we produce. About 40% of our national income is derived by trade