Mr. Speaker, I know the member sits on the public accounts committee as well. I want to ask him about the shifting of the tax burden from corporations to individuals. I guess if the government could offer some proof that this strategy actually works, more people may be converted to the idea.
However, the government has simply reduced its corporate tax from 40% down to 15% over the last few years, while the Americans are still at around 35%. There is no need for our country to be that much lower than the United States, especially when corporate taxes in some of the Nordic countries are at 50%.
If there were results coming out of this, the government would have an argument, but Statistics Canada and Finance Canada have said that business spending on machinery and equipment has declined as a share of GDP. Kevin Lynch, former Clerk of the Privy Council and cabinet secretary, said that IT use by Canadian business is only half of the United States.
Despite Canadian corporate taxes, the productivity growth is actually worse. Experts are exposing the government's policy as not working the way it says that it will. Why does it keep blindly following Ronald Reagan economics, or what George Bush called voodoo economics, when it has been proven not to have the desired effect?