Mr. Speaker, I cannot explain the dissonance the member is experiencing, but I can explain our record. We reduced the size of the federal government to its smallest as a share of the economy in the last 50 years. We had the least expensive government as a share of the economy in the last half century, and the results were very positive. As I said, poverty rates fell down to 8.8%, which is the lowest level in recorded history, much lower than when the Liberals were previously in government and vastly lower than during the last Trudeau government, whose policies the present government is trying to replicate.
The member talked about supply-side economics. He and his party subscribe to a theory of trickle-down government. If they take money from working people and they put it on the top of a big bureaucracy, it will trickle down through that bureaucracy, then it will go to another level of government, then maybe to the municipal government and then it will be given to interest groups that will fan out, and a few drops will trickle down to the people at the bottom who pay the bills. We do not accept trickle-down government. It is a theory that has been disproved time and again. It has failed. It leads only to bankruptcy and suffering, as we saw in Greece.
We believe in bottom-up economics. We raised the personal exemption by $1,500, lifting a million people off the tax rolls altogether. We lowered federal income taxes for people earning less than $30,000 a year by 90%. The result was people were able to earn their way out of poverty and build a brighter future for themselves.