Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the new member for Winnipeg South on his election to this place and I wish him well during his time here.
In his speech he cited completely misleading statistics to support the central premise of this big-spending, big-borrowing, big-taxing budget when he said that the top 1% of income earners had benefited from all of the income growth in the past 35 years.
It is very interesting that he would replicate the Minister of Finance's statistical jiggery-pokery of choosing the 35-year time frame. That statistic is true if we start from 1982, from the period of the Trudeau administration, but interestingly, during the administration of the previous Conservative government, the average growth in real family income for the top 1% income earners from 2005 to 2014 actually shrank, while real average median after-tax incomes for the average middle income family went up by 11%. The actual picture of income distribution and growth between 2006 and 2015 looks radically different from what it does if we go back to 1982.
I have a very simple question. Why is he presenting misleading figures in order to justify his budget? Why does it not stand on its own?