Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today and speak, in the strongest possible terms, in support of the motion by my colleague, the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley. It is a twofold motion; it would do two things. It would first signal the drastic increase in inequality in our country, and second, more specifically, it would address the Conservatives' proposed policy of income splitting. I would like to address both of those in the short time available to me.
I am pleased to learn today that the Liberal Party is going to be in support of this initiative. The Conservatives are obviously deeply divided on this. Today we got an Orwellian rebranding of the income splitting proposal. I understand we are now to term it the “family tax fairness initiative”, which has a very nice ring to it.
Let me be personal for just a moment. When I was running for election a year and a half ago to represent the people of Victoria, I ran into a retired schoolteacher on a doorstep in Oak Bay. She asked, “Do you feel it?” I asked what. She asked if I felt how Canada is changing; if I felt how we are no longer glued together as a community as we were; if I felt the increasing gap between the rich and poor. She asked if that is the kind of community we want our children to grow up in. I said no. That is one of the reasons I am so proudly speaking in support of my colleague.
This retired schoolteacher got it right. We can literally feel the change, and I do not want my kids to grow up in that kind of country. I want the kind of country I benefited from when I grew up in a lower middle class family where all opportunities were available, rather than creating a permanent underclass of the poor, and a few very rich people. That is the kind of economy I fear we are going to experience in the future.
I am not just saying that from a fearmongering perspective. On April 3, a Globe and Mail headline was “Canada’s 86 wealthiest have as much as the 11.4 million poorest”. That is shocking. It is shocking that 0.002% of the total population is getting richer and now has as much wealth accumulated as 11.4 million Canadians. The top 20% have half the income, but what is more telling is that the top 20% now have 70% of the wealth of our country. Most Canadians understand that the current government has abandoned the middle class and the poor, with little job security and high debt, and so many of our fellow citizens are living paycheque to paycheque.
Statistics Canada also showed wealth gravitating to the top. While median income rose almost 80% since 1999 to $243,800 per family unit, the top 40% possessed 88.9% of total net worth, leaving the bottom 60% with a mere 11.1% of the pie. The poorest 20% of family units had more debts than assets.
The author of a report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives concludes, “If one Canadian makes $100,000 a year selling a company (or shares) while another makes $100,000 a year working at a job, the worker will pay twice the tax of the business seller”. We are in desperate need of Carter 2 in this country for a review of our tax system, which is only contributing to this increasing inequity, which that schoolteacher told me she felt so tangibly and which we all know is going on around us.
However, what about the new income splitting proposal, which has so divided the Conservatives, which is now to be called the “family tax fairness project”. It amounts to a tax break for the most wealthy. It would cost the federal government $3 billion a year without providing benefits to a staggering 86% of our families. My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley got it right when he said that the Conservatives are clinging to a bad idea due to “hubris and pride”, as he termed it. I just wish they would do what the famous former premier of British Columbia, W.A.C. Bennett, said: take a sober second look.