Mr. Speaker, first of all, it is the Conservatives who have called payroll taxes a “job-killing tax”. In fact, the Minister of Finance is on the record saying that, yet he has increased payroll taxes by at least $600 million per year.
This makes no sense at a time when unemployment rates remain stubbornly high. Unemployment rates are still over a point higher than they were five years ago. Employment rates for young Canadians are five points worse than they were five years ago. It makes no sense to increase payroll taxes during a downturn.
In fact, it was the Conservatives who brought in measures on the governance of the EI system to force the system to balance itself over a shorter time horizon, which created the perverse effect of higher payroll taxes during times of downturn. They have since ignored their own mechanism to do that, but it is bad public policy in any case. It has created a lot of uncertainty and it is killing the capacity for small business people to create jobs in Canada.