Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for his speech and welcome him to the House.
One of the tenets of good government is to never over-commit and under-deliver. We looked through this piece of legislation about the upcoming help for the middle class because it was lauded and repeated ad nauseam in the campaign. While middle class was never defined and remains undefined by my Liberal colleagues today, definitions matter when it comes to things like the tax code.
I would like my friend to comment on this. We find that, under this plan, 18 million Canadians who file taxes would see no benefit whatsoever. Further to that, a lot of Canadians watching or listening to us would see people as middle class when they earn between $48,000 and $62,000 a year. That sounds kind of middle class to me, and where I live in northern B.C., it would be solidly middle class. Those folks would get a benefit of $50.
We now look up to the higher end of the tax spectrum, which may include Liberal middle-class people—I am not sure; again, the Liberals remain unwilling or unable to define it. We see that people who earn $200,000 would receive 16 times more benefit than somebody earning $50,000. People earning $200,000 are the middle class that the current Prime Minister and the Liberals were talking about.
However, I wonder if he does not run the risk of raising those expectations and hopes only to dash them upon the rocks of those tax returns that are coming, for all those middle-class Canadians who are wondering where the help is for them when somebody making $200,000 is getting upward of $800. That is 16 times more than the average middle-class Canadian would receive.