Mr. Speaker, moments ago the finance minister had the audacity to say that families like his are not getting any benefit cheques in Canada. This is from the finance minister who, we learned only days ago, has been taking $65,000 dividend cheques from a company he regulates, and those are on a monthly basis, not to be confused.
This is from a finance minister who says that a “privileged few” should pay more, yet nothing in today's proposal would see the family fortunes of the finance minister or the Prime Minister touched by any taxes at all. Once again, they have sheltered themselves.
Now I'll go on to the bigger picture.
The Prime Minister promised a small $10 billion deficit. Do members remember that? Today we learn that the deficit is double that. He promised the budget would be balanced by 2019. Now we learn that the deficit will be almost $17 billion in that year and there are no balanced budgets projected by the government, ever. There is literally not a single year into the distant future when the Liberal government projects ever eliminating the deficit, apparently believing that the government can borrow its way out of debt into prosperity.
The pattern here is a government that does exactly the opposite of what it says. The Liberals said they would raise taxes on the rich, and now, according to the finance minister's own department, the rich are paying $1 billion less in taxes.
They claimed they would lower taxes on the middle class. The Fraser Institute confirmed that 87% of middle-class taxpayers are paying more income tax today than they were when the Prime Minister took office—on average $800 more. Middle-class people like farmers, plumbers, and electricians pay $800 more in tax while millionaires like the Prime Minister and the finance minister are actually paying lower tax.
The Liberals claimed that they would close loopholes; meanwhile the Prime Minister puts his money away in trust funds that avoid paying any new tax under his proposals. The same Prime Minister puts funds in numbered companies so that he can avoid paying tax.
The finance minister stuffs away his $20 million investment in Morneau Shepell in a numbered company in Alberta. He lives on Bay Street, yet his companies are in Alberta, Barbados, and France, all of which allow him to pay lower taxes than everyone else pays. He is the very definition of the privileged few, the aristocratic, old money elite, who have taken generational wealth handed down from those who came before them, like the Prime Minister, who took his wealth from the petroleum empire of his grandfather and yet now wants to protect his own benefits from additional taxation while he forces others to pay more.
Such is the system of government that the Liberal Party creates.
The government gave nearly $400 million in handouts to Bombardier—a company, by the way, that has hired the finance minister's family business. Now, that company is selling its intellectual property and its next generation aircraft to a European company, effectively a subsidy from the federal government to protect the wealthy and the well connected—in particular, this time, the billionaire Bombardier Beaudoin family. It is the old feudal economy, where the rich get richer and the working class pay the bills.
This is the new trickle-down government, where it takes money from the working class, puts it in the hands of politicians who give it to the wealthiest corporations, and expects us to believe that a few drops will trickle down to the people who earned it in the first place. The ultimate concentration of wealth is the government. The bigger the government gets, the more business invests in lobbying for a larger share of that money.
Various definitive research shows that, if government gets bigger, then businesses spend more on lobbying. They understand that the way to get rich in a government-run economy is by having the best lobbyist, and the way to get ahead in a free market economy is by having the best product or service.
On this side of the House of Commons, we believe in a free enterprise economy where one can only get better off if one sells a product or service that is worth more than the people have to pay for it. It is where one cannot force people to buy a product through a government edict or subsidy or taxation, and where one has to convince people that the thing at offer is actually worth more to them than the dollar they part with to buy it.
The government wants to leave behind that free enterprise tradition that has created all of the prosperity that Canadians enjoy. We believe in an economy based on meritocracy. The Liberals believe in an economy based on old money and privilege. It is no surprise, because that is the experience. It is what they have known. It is what they have always understood.
On this side of the aisle we will continue to champion the underdog, the striver, the upstart, and the challenger, while the Liberals look for new ways to put up obstacles in the way of those who try to get ahead, in order to protect the privilege of those who already have lots of money. We will knock down those barriers so people can keep building, growing, and getting ahead, where they will be judged not by their connections or their family pedigree but by what they have to contribute, and where we see the dignity of work inside every single Canadian and the potential for them to play out that dignity with their own merit and their own contributions. That is the free enterprise, merit-driven vision we have for the economy.
While the Liberals continue to expropriate billions of dollars from entrepreneurs and workers in order to spend on complicated schemes such as superclusters and Bombardier bailouts, we will leave that money in the hands of the people who earned it, because they are always better at spending it than those politicians who tax it.
That is the approach the Conservatives have always taken. It is the reason why, under then prime minister Harper, we had the biggest drop and the lowest levels of poverty in recorded Canadian history. Poverty fell from highs in the mid-teens under the first Trudeau government to 8.8% in the last full year that then prime minister Harper served. He did it by raising the personal exemption, to free a million low-income Canadians from taxation. He brought in the working income tax benefit, to give a pay increase to low-income working people trying to escape from social assistance. He eliminated red tape, so small upstart businesses that could not afford accountants and crafty consultants could start their businesses without the shackles of government holding them back.
We opened up the economy so that people could strive hard, work hard, and get ahead on their own merit. That is the opportunity economy that we will create, that is the vision we will present, and that is the vision Canadians will choose in 2019.