Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate having the opportunity to respond to the NDP on this question.
First, we need to be clear, very clear, that provincial taxes are a provincial responsibility. That includes decisions about harmonized sales taxes. As former premier of Ontario and the current Liberal MP for Toronto Centre recently remarked, “It's up to the provinces to decide whether they want to proceed with a harmonized tax. It's a decision for them, not us”.
Provinces have full independence to make decisions on sales tax matters. These are exclusive decisions of provincial governments, not the federal government. Recently, certain provincial governments made changes to their provincial tax system. A couple of them decided to replace their sales tax system with another.
The recently elected NDP Nova Scotia government decided to increase its sales tax. As the Chronicle Herald reported last year: “Nova Scotia sales tax is going up to 15% in July. The increase of two percentage points in the harmonized sales tax in the NDP's first full year budget breaks Premier Darrell Dexter's campaign promise that the NDP wouldn't raise taxes”.
I would add the NDP tax hike in Nova Scotia is an important lesson for any Canadian looking at the NDP here in Ottawa.
Again, these were all provincial decisions, not federal decisions. There was no revenue impact at the federal level.
Nevertheless, as a result of recent provincial decisions, questions have come up in provinces, like Alberta, about changes in cost on mail and courier services. Again, nothing has changed at the federal level. For mail and courier services, sales tax has always been applied on the basis of where the consumption takes place.
If the NDP members have an issue with a provincial tax decision, they need to talk to a provincial government to have that debate not a previous provincial representative but the provincial government.
This is a federal Parliament, so let us talk about federal taxes, specifically lowering them. Unlike the NDP, our Conservative government believes leaving more money in the pockets of hard-working Canadians is the right thing to do. Unlike the NDP, we have the record to prove it.
Since coming to office in 2006 we cut over 100 taxes, reducing taxes in every way government collects them. We removed over one million low income Canadians completely from the tax roll. We reduced the overall tax burden to its lowest level in nearly 50 years. We cut taxes for all Canadians, even those who do not earn enough to pay personal income tax. That is when we cut the GST to 5%.
Shockingly, the NDP has voted against every tax cut we introduced. I ask the NDP a very simple question, why did it oppose lowering the GST for Canadian families and why does it continue to oppose every incentive to lower taxes for Canadians, including Albertans?