Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the final hours of debate on Bill C-2.
We all recognize that this piece of legislation, rushed into the House in December, a forerunner of the budget scheduled for March 22, was intended to fulfill a number of misguided campaign promises in time for a new taxation year. I must say that over the hours of debate since the speech by the Minister of Finance, his answers in debate and in question period, his pronouncements in various fora across Canada, Canadians are getting a very clear and concerning picture of where the government intends to go in terms of taxation, the collection of Canadians' hard-earned tax dollars, and of spending, namely, that it intends to go on a mega disbursement spree of those same hard-earned tax dollars.
The economic situation in Canada today, which a number of speakers have remarked upon, is truly a crisis in parts of the country walloped by the crash of resource prices, but it is not at all like the 2008-09 global recession. The fact is that Canada is not in recession today. Focused stimulation, tax cuts, incentives, and decisive and courageous support of projects such as pipelines and power projects are, indeed, appropriate for provinces hit hard by the resource downturn. However, massive, expansionary government spending, growth of the debt, increased debt servicing, and the mortgaging of our children's futures is simply not justified.
The minister's much touted middle-class tax cut will, he proclaimed, put more money into the pockets of Canadians who need it. The tax cut does, modestly, do that, but the finance minister himself estimates that that it will amount to barely $10 a week for the middle class and then, as our NDP colleagues have pointed out, only a portion of the middle class. At the same time, the Liberals promised that the total cost of the tax cuts would be offset by a new tax on Canada's most affluent taxpayers. Again, a reality check from Finance Canada reveals that, in fact, there will be at least a billion dollar shortfall in the Liberals' estimate, or, more appropriately, guesstimate, which is hardly reassuring as we anticipate the coming budget.
I will move on to the minister's ill-advised trimming of the tax-free savings accounts. The TFSA, as we know, was created by our previous Conservative government, along with more than 180 tax cuts made between 2006 and 2015. These tax cuts combined to give Canadians across all income groups significantly greater take-home income and reduced the federal tax burden to the lowest level in half a century. About half of adult Canadians today have tax-free savings accounts, which is a very high level of participation, indeed, for a program that only began in 2009.
These numbers have been cited before, but I am proud to remind the government again that of those TFSA investors who took advantage of last year's $10,000 limit, fully 60% earned $60,000 or less, which refutes the Prime Minister and the finance minister's characterization of the TFSA as a tool for the rich only. The tax-free savings account is also a particularly important retirement savings tool for seniors who can no longer take advantage of RRSPs, registered retirement savings plans.
A majority of Canadians supported and still support the $10,000 limit. Public opinion polls reflected this and still reflect this. That support is consistent across all age groups, income levels, and regions of our country. That support was reflected in one of the first e-petitions to the government, an e-petition that I was proud to sponsor. Folks at home can find and consider that petition at petitions.parl.gc.ca, listed under e-3, with the key words “taxation”, and “tax free savings account”. This petition has accumulated almost 5,000 signatures, even though the government plowed ahead in reducing this year's TFSA contribution level by half. The petition is still open for another month, and frustrated Canadians can still register their unhappiness with the government's decision until April.
The government tried to justify the gutting of the annual savings limits with the excuse that the TFSA cost the government too much. The federal government spends much more every year to support the very generous indexed pensions of government employees. Those public service pensions are paid for with the hard-earned tax dollars of the 80% of Canadians who do not work for the government, who have much less generous employer pension plans, or who must provide entirely for their own retirement.
In my constituency, the wonderfully diverse middle-class community of Thornhill, TFSAs have become an important part of taxpayers' retirement savings portfolios, an important part, again, of our senior citizens' retirement savings portfolios. That is evident across all income levels, as national polls show.
Making the retirement savings process even more challenging and burdensome, the new federal government has agreed to collect for the spendthrift Government of Ontario the job-killing payroll taxes from employees and employers for the so-called Ontario retirement pension plan. The ORPP is sold as a top-up to the Canada pension plan, but it will take fully 40 years to reach its modest annual payback level. Why now? What is the rush?
Well, Premier Wynne's government, in an amazing blaze of unintended transparency, in its 2014 budget, revealed that the ORPP is not really designed for retirees. The budget document revealed that ORPP is really a tax grab. It will help bail out the debt and deficit created by the provincial Liberal government's misspending. The 2014 budget said precisely that by “encouraging more Ontarians to save through a proposed new Ontario Retirement Pension Plan, new pools of capital would be available for Ontario-based projects such as building roads, bridges and new transit.”
The federal government is now complicit by recently agreeing to collect for Ontario the job-killing employment taxes, not for the workers of today who will see little, if any, eventual benefit, but effectively to create a new slush fund for its provincial Liberal cousins who have created the largest sub-national debt in the world.
A variation of an old joke, not that far from reality is, ask an Ontario Liberal how to create a small business and they will say, take a medium-sized business and tax it down to size.
I see my remaining time is short, so I will briefly return to the Minister of Finance's remarks, when he introduced to Bill C-2, in which he talked about growth and investment in the budget that will tabled March 22.
We on this side of the House are very concerned about the dark reality for Canadian taxpayers and the Canadian economy that will, we believe, define those words. The growth that the minister and Prime Minister are trying, unwisely, to create will be in annual deficits: $30 billion, $40 billion, or more, in expansionary spending that simply cannot be justified. The investment will be the billions of dollars of deeper debt that our children and grandchildren will eventually have to confront.
If the Liberals are really serious about growing the economy, the minister must come forward with a jobs plan that will actually help get Canadians back to work. He should abandon the rush to recklessly push Canadians' billions of hard-earned tax dollars into spontaneously confected, inadequately planned infrastructure projects or to impose new regulations and taxes based on half-baked theories.