Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hard-working member for Foothills.
Today we are debating the motion by the official opposition calling on the government to continue the consultations, which is quite reasonable. The consultation process to this point was launched by the government July 18 and went to October 2. If we were to look at a calendar, we would see that it was during the summer. It was announced during the summer after people had made plans and when Canadians were busy doing what they do in the summer. Surprise, there are these consultations and the position paper by the government. If we look at when these consultations were held, particularly in the fall, it was often when the people who were not on holidays were at work. That is when the consultations were held. A neighbouring riding had the consultations in the middle of the week at three o'clock in the afternoon. That is when hard-working Canadians are at work. We are not talking about people living on trust funds, but hard-working Canadians.
Throughout the whole process, there were questions about whether this was a genuine consultation. I fear not. Also, through this process, hard-working Canadians have been called tax cheats. The Liberals have said that they want a healthy middle class, and yet they are attacking them. They want tax fairness, yet the wealthiest Canadians, some of them sitting in this House, are exempt from what is being proposed. It is not hurting wealthy Canadians, but hard-working middle-class Canadians.
During this process, if we go through the bafflegab and look at how the Liberal policies are affecting Canadians, we see from a report that came out at the same time that the vast majority of Canadians are actually paying more tax and have less money in their pockets than under the previous government. The policies and consultation are disingenuous.
As October 2 end-date of the so-called consultation period approached, the number one thing I heard from my constituents was that they did not believe the government was listening. They believe this will go ahead anyway and that the consultations were just lip service or smoke and mirrors.
In our local newspaper, there was an article by a neighbouring Liberal member of Parliament that reads, “So far, I have heard from constituents including small business owners and incorporated professionals”—