Mr. Speaker, here is what the NDP leader and the NDP MPs should really be telling their trusting supporters. The NDP would bring the qualifying age for OAS to 65, 11 years from now, but people would have to pay more for eggs, bread, milk and other groceries, more to heat their homes, more for electricity, more to fill up their cars and more for everything they buy at the mall, forever, and they would never break even. The NDP cares about them.
The reality is the ideologues in the NDP, who for decades have cherished policies designed to redistribute what they call wealth evenly to all Canadians, will not give the policies up. Instead of creating an equal playing field of opportunity for all Canadians—who work hard, make sacrifices and take risks to be able to improve their own lives and build a little wealth—which is what the bill would help to do, the NDP expects them to risk their life savings to start a business and create jobs for others, for a take-home pay based upon some kind of national average, created through massive tax increases.
The Broadbent Institute calls this a more equal Canada. The question is: Equal to what? It would be equal to Greece, perhaps.
This bill demonstrates our agenda. But why is the NDP opposed?
In a report published last week, the socialists at the Broadbent Institute laid bare their true beliefs, demonstrating they want governments to have a much greater piece of the earnings of all Canadians. They think that is how wealth is created, because they learned that in books written by people who read it in other books. These ideas and statements inevitably come from people who have never started a business and usually never even worked in one.
In the recent report, the socialists were severely disappointed that taxes in Canada are only 31% as a share of national income, while they are 34% in most advanced countries, which means they not only want the $21.5 billion carbon tax but another $30 billion to implement their theories on Canadians.
How do they measure success? It is in how much taxes people pay, not quality of life, not the total average income, not how carefully taxes are spent and what value we get from money, and not the most important indicator of a true democracy: social and economic mobility—how many Canadians can access post-secondary training and education so they can have a better quality of life than their parents did—not how easy or difficult it is for an entrepreneur to start a business and hire others, improving their lives. They study how much of the wealth is mine, how much is ours, how much should be the government's and how we need the government to take more so it can do everything for us. They call it social spending.
These are people who, if they were isolated on a desert island, would sit for days and talk about how to divide up their last fish. The Conservatives would be out finding ways to catch more. The Liberals would be talking about who should decide. And the Green Party would be burying the fish for fertilizer.
Here are the new taxes the socialists want to introduce in Canada, as expressed by the NDP soulmates at the Broadbent Institute.
One, increase the capital gains tax to the same level as income tax. That would reduce investment in Canada that creates jobs.
Two, eliminate tax loopholes they say are only for the rich. However, we know from our experience in Ontario that it would affect the entire middle class.
Three, introduce a death tax to eliminate—and I am quoting from the Broadbent Institute—“morally unjustifiable class privilege being passed on to the next generation”. Let me translate that. That is the money our parents worked so hard to save, so that we could have a better quality of life than they did. They do not say if they would take 100% or 90% or just 50%, but it would all go to the collectives.
I am not making this stuff up. They want to tax financial transactions. That would discourage investors from buying and trading in Canadian securities, which is a key source of job growth.
They want, of course, a carbon tax and higher taxes on natural resources; all this to promote a socially and environmentally sustainable society.
The tax grabs are always couched in terms of the environment or social justice, which means they would decide, using taxes, the take-home pay of every person in Canada. They dream that everyone would work as hard for the collective as they do for their own families.
That Marxist theory has failed in every country in the world in which it has been tried, yet the socialists never give up.
They also want premiums on social service programs—in other words, user fees for social services. It is very important for everyone to know that.
They want more value-added taxes. On top of the GST and the provincial taxes, it appears they want a new value-added tax.
That would all fund expensive, unaffordable entitlement programs, the kind that have bankrupted most of Europe.
We believe in the freedom to work hard, choose to start one's own business or not, pay reasonable taxes, earn good wages or profits, and not be continually harassed and burdened by new fees, taxes and unnecessary rules from three levels of government.
This bill would be an important step along the road to the prosperity that all Canadians deserve.