Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise on this motion today. I am going to tackle this question by focusing on two aspects.
The Statistics Canada data to which the NDP makes reference has two problems attached to it.
The first is the fact that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, so it is a question of distribution. Here, I think, only the Liberals have a coherent plan to help those Canadians who are worse off.
The second aspect is that the average person's income has hardly grown over many years, and that is a question of growing the pie, creating wealth and improving our productivity performance. This is an area in which the NDP has absolutely no understanding.
As well, as I shall indicate in my remarks, the Conservatives are wrong-headed by adopting measures that will not do anything to improve productivity and living standards in this country.
First of all, I would like to point out that the NDP has taken a contradictory position, which is not all that surprising.
On the one hand, the NDP claims that, as a party, it now understands Quebec and Quebeckers. On the other hand, based on my calculations, if the NDP manages to get its motion adopted, when would the election be held? It would be held June 23, the day before Quebec's national holiday. For a party that claims to understand Quebeckers, it is a little strange that the NDP would make Quebeckers vote in a general election the day before their national holiday.
The first issue here is to help those who are worse off. On this issue I at least agree that the NDP would be in the same spirit as the Liberal Party. The difference is that we have a concrete and very ambitious plan, and we will form government at some point and will be in a position to implement this plan.
As my colleague has mentioned, this is the so-called 30-50 plan, in which we have committed publicly to reduce the overall number of Canadians living in poverty by 30% over a five year period and to reduce numbers of children in poverty by 50% over a five year period. By setting out those concrete targets, we are holding our feet to the fire, because the commentators will monitor our progress and make sure we hit our targets.
There are three basic components of this plan. One is an expanded “making work pay” benefit, which will help lower income Canadians climb over the welfare wall, get over the disincentives to work and become full participants in the labour force. This is good for the incomes of lower income Canadians and also good for productivity.
The second component is that we will provide major support for working families. We will provide child tax credits as the Conservatives did, but ours will have one key critical and crucial difference. The Conservative tax credits are non-refundable, meaning that if people's incomes are so low that they pay no tax, they get no credit. Therefore, the high income Canadian, like the Minister of Finance, gets large sums of money from these credits, and he does not really need it, while the lower income Canadians who do not make enough to pay tax and therefore are not eligible for this credit get nothing at all. Our child tax credit will be refundable, meaning that the lower income Canadians who pay no tax will get just as much, at least as much, as the higher income Canadians.
The third important component of our 30-50 anti-poverty plan is to increase the GIS, the funding for income for lower income seniors. We will increase that as well.
Through these measures and a number of other measures, we are totally serious about making a radical dent in poverty in general and in child poverty over the five years from the time we come to power. These measures will certainly have a major bearing on this increased inequality that has afflicted Canada and indeed countries throughout the western world over the last decades.
I come now to the second aspect. The first aspect is to reduce the inequality and our anti-poverty plan will make a major move in that direction.
The second component is to grow the pie: to increase the productivity so that the income levels and the living standards of all Canadians will rise more quickly over the coming 10 years, let us say, than they did over the last 10 to 20 years. It is here I believe that the Liberal Party is unique in this House, because the NDP has no understanding of wealth creation, of growing the pie, and the Conservative Party and government have zero interest in helping those who are in poverty because that is not their base.
We are the party of balance. We understand that one has to grow the pie and create the wealth in order to redistribute it.
On the subject of productivity, I think the NDP should study very carefully the new ideas and new policies emerging in Europe among their social democratic brethren, particularly in Scandinavia, and indeed among NDP-led provinces, which have to actually govern and therefore understand the real world.
I would say that only the federal NDP is left in a kind of class warfare mentality of the 1960s where anything that reduces corporate taxes, for example, is inherently evil, while the NDP-led provinces and Scandinavian countries led by social democrats are in fact leading the way and understand the need for lower corporate taxes to enhance productivity. Indeed, the Scandinavian countries are leading the world in terms of having among the lowest corporate tax rates. Among those with the highest corporate tax rates, one finds George Bush's United States.
I would suggest to the NDP that it is necessary to grow the pie, as well as to share the pie, because if we do not grow the pie and the pie shrinks then we will have very little to share.
As we in the Liberal Party have said, competitive corporate taxes are an important part of the productivity agenda. We need look no further than Denmark, Sweden and Norway to find leadership in this area. I know the Conservatives agree with us on this. Following our leader's call for corporate tax rates, soon thereafter they copied the idea.
Another important angle about improving productivity and living standards is to tax smart. We in the Liberal Party have favoured not only lower corporate taxes but lower personal income taxes to give people the incentive to save, to work and to invest. That would be a part of our program, funds permitting.
Whereas, on the government side, the Conservatives put no less than $12 billion a year, $60 billion over five years, into the worst, dumbest possible tax cut that anyone could imagine, and that is to cut the GST, a tax on consumption, rather than to use that money to cut taxes on income.
There is not an economist on the planet who would disagree with my view that if we want to improve incentives to save, to invest and to work, if we want to improve Canada's competitiveness and productivity, the way to go is to reduce income tax. According to IMF,OECD, C.D. Howe, The Fraser Institute, name it, the worst thing to do, the most anti-productivity tax agenda is to reduce the GST.
To conclude, to deal with this problem of a growing gap and stagnant incomes requires a double policy to provide public assistance to those at the low end, which is at the core of the Liberal 30-50 plan, and, on the other hand, to produce a sensible, credible, coherent plan to raise the productivity growth of this country and thereby grow the pie and enhance the living standards of all Canadians.
I submit that in terms of this balance between wealth creation and wealth distribution, it is only the Liberal Party that offers the balance that this country needs.