Madam Speaker, I hesitate to follow the member for Burlington who is such a passionate defender of lowering taxes in this country.
It is my pleasure today to address the motion put forward by the Liberal Party of Canada. I stand today in support of Canada's job creators and against this very irresponsible tax hike proposal by the Liberal Party that would threaten our economic recovery and harm hard-working Canadian families.
Unlike the Liberal Party that wants higher taxes to fuel bigger bureaucracies, our government believes in keeping taxes low for both families and job creators.
Since we took office in 2006, we have aggressively pursued a low tax plan to help create jobs right across this country. It is a plan with over 100 tax cuts to date and it is reducing taxes in every single way the government collects them: personal, consumption, business, excise taxes and more. Our low tax plan has reduced the overall tax burden on Canadians to its lowest level in nearly 50 years. It is a low tax plan that has already removed over one million low income Canadians completely from the tax rolls. It is a low tax plan that has reduced the GST, a tax on every Canadian, from 7% to 5%, that introduced the landmark tax free savings account to help Canadians save and much more. It is a low tax plan that has left nearly $3,000 in the pockets of a typical Canadian family, where it belongs, to save or spend as that family sees fit.
We have also lowered taxes for businesses so they can keep more of their hard-earned money, allowing them to grow and create more jobs for Canadians.
Our plan has included everything from broad-based business tax relief; support to the provinces in their elimination of job-killing capital taxes; lowering the tax rate for small businesses from 12% to 11%; increasing the bracket for the small business tax rate from $300,000 to $500,000; eliminating tariffs on productivity-improving machinery and equipment, which was done in last year's Budget Implementation Act; introducing a temporary accelerated capital cost allowance, which was begun back in budget 2007 on manufacturing or processing machinery and equipment; and much more. This broad-based tax relief has served as the centrepiece of our low tax plan for businesses and has proven successful in spurring investment in Canada and helping to create jobs for Canadians.
In 2007, our government introduced and Parliament passed these broad-based tax reductions that will lower Canada's business tax rate to 15% in 2012.
Since 2007, Canadian businesses have been making their investment decisions and hiring Canadian workers based on this low tax plan for businesses. Over 110,000 businesses in Canada are currently benefiting from our low tax plan to grow and create more and better paying jobs for Canadians.
The economic benefits of our government's low tax plan have been verified by numerous independent observers. A well-respected University of Calgary economist, Jack Mintz, recently released a report showing that the final three point reduction in the business tax rate alone would lead to nearly $50 billion in greater capital investment and over 200,000 new jobs over time.
Similarly, the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters recently released another report praising our low tax plan as “critical drivers of the Canadian economy” that will, among other things, help to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, increase the personal incomes of Canadians by over $30 billion, increase per capita personal income by $880, and contribute between $2.6 billion and $3.7 billion in additional net revenues for all levels of government.
I encourage all parliamentarians to read these objective reports to see the facts on this issue.
It has to be noted that the Liberals claimed to support this broad-based tax relief but let us remember that on April 2, 2008, they stood in this chamber to oppose a very similar motion from the NDP. Canadians should review the debate in that Hansard.
I would like to remind the Liberals of that debate and what the Liberal finance critic at the time, my friend, the member for Markham—Unionville, said. He said:
...we need to create a new Canadian advantage to attract capital and jobs to this country and that new Canadian advantage...is to create a low corporate tax rate....
That we believe will replace the weak currency as a new Canadian advantage and will serve this country well to improve productivity, competitiveness and attract jobs....
The federal NDP members are in the class war mentality where any corporate tax cut is just seen as a sop to the rich. They do not understand, as their Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, British fellow social democrats learned long ago, that we have to create wealth before we can redistribute it, and that in order to compete in this world and get jobs it makes sense to have lower corporate tax rates.
Why are the federal NDP members almost alone in the world in being the Neanderthal version of the global social democratic movement.
Those are harsh words, not from me but from the Liberal finance critic at the time. It is just shocking to hear the kind of language they would use. However, his argument was exactly right and his argument is the argument that our government is putting forward in pursuing the path that we are on. It is interesting that the argument used by the Liberal finance critic at the time is something that the Liberal Party and the Liberal leader fail to understand today.
As chair of the finance committee, I have the privilege every year of travelling across the country and hearing from many communities across this great country. We heard from many of the over 110,000 businesses and their representatives, groups like the Mining Association of British Columbia, Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association, the Conseil du patronat du Québec, the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian institute of Chartered Accountants. All of those groups were unanimous in their support for our low tax plan.
A witness from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, in his testimony before the committee, said:
The single most important or most damaging thing the government could do at this point to stall the recovery would be to cancel the planned tax reductions. Business has been planning on them. The private sector has been hiring based on them. The private sector has been investing based on them. If suddenly those were repealed at this point, the impact would be to get business to shelve its plans for expansion and getting people back to work.
We in this party are committed to helping create more and more jobs by making Canada the best place to do business with our low tax plan.
Canada's continued job growth shows it is getting positive results. Indeed, we have created over 460,000 jobs since July 2009, a very good statement for the economy, and the strongest job growth in the G7 with nearly 70,000 jobs created in January alone according to Statistics Canada.
However, too many Canadians are still looking for work and the global economic recovery remains fragile. We must stay the course with our low tax plan to protect and create jobs to allow companies to invest across this country.
I encourage all members of this House to reject the Liberal plan to raise taxes and, frankly, embrace the position that it held only a few months ago to continue with this path to allow Canada to remain an economic leader in the world today.