Mr. Speaker, it gives me pleasure to rise today. I will make one solemn promise to the House that I will not scream and yell as I give my statement today on the motion. The motion says:
That, given the average middle class Canadian is already overburdened with taxes, the House call on the government to abandon any plans it may have to in any way tax health and dental care plans.
Make no mistake, this is and was the plan of the government in spite of what the Prime Minister said yesterday. I will acknowledge that he stood up here and said that there will be no tax on health and dental care plans, but given the events of the last couple of days I find it very hard to believe, as do many of the colleagues on this side of the House, anything that the Prime Minister says.
It is kind of ironic as well that today is Groundhog Day, because we are talking about Liberal tax increases and the potential thereof. Those of us who live in Ontario and those of us who represent Ontario understand full well the impact that the Ontario Liberal government has made with respect to tax increases and service cuts. I will remind everybody again that Ontario is the most indebted sub-sovereign borrower in the world. To think that we are not on that path with the current government is foolhardy, naive, and a mistake on all of us not to recognize that. Ontario is $315 billion in debt; $22,500 per person is the share of the debt. That is 50% more than California's per person share of debt.
The Liberal government has spoke about debt and deficits. The Liberals promised a balanced budget by 2019. We now see that is not going to happen. In fact, the debt, as projected by the finance department, is going to be $1.5 trillion in 15 years, which is going to work out to about $42,000 of debt per person, per Canadian. Let us think about that. Let us think about the young people, and there are some in the gallery today, who are going to be shouldering the burden of that debt. By contrast, the Conservative plan for debt was that it would have been gone by 2038, and there would have been a $1.7-trillion surplus by 2015 and a balanced budget by 2055.
The reality is this. We have seen this in Ontario and it should come as no surprise to anybody in Ontario that this is happening federally. There is one person who lurks in the shadows of the Prime Minister's Office who has initiated a lot of the failed policies in Ontario, and his name is Gerald Butts. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If 1,000 people do something stupid, it is still stupid. The policies of the current Liberal government that it is following with the Ontario Liberals are going to put us in a position of bankruptcy, in a position of significant debt. Those numbers are not numbers that I am taking out of the air. They are numbers that are quantifiable.
Here is what happens. Taxes go up, services go down. We are already starting to see that. In fact, I know that the Liberals talk about the budget in 2016. Here are some of the losers of that budget: the children; arts and fitness tax credits; the Liberals have cut the education and textbook tax credit; new mortgage rules making it harder to get approved for a home loan; a national carbon tax has been announced; Canada pension plan tax hike; cancellation of the small business tax cut; and elimination of the hiring tax credit.
The thing that really bothers me is that one tax credit because I come from a riding where there are a lot of single-income families. In fact, prior to being elected to Parliament, I was one of those families. The fact was that I was able to split my income with my wife by $2,000. The Liberals eliminated that. Therefore what the Liberals give, the Liberals take away.
I will remind the House that I will be splitting my time with the member for South Surrey—White Rock.
The Liberals give with one hand and take away with the other.
I have said many times in the House that effectively, what the Liberals are perpetrating on Canadians is middle-class tax fraud.
Why are we here today? It is because we hear this narrative all the time: the middle class and those working hard to join it. The reality is that when they pile on debt and deficit the way the Liberal government is, how are the middle class and those working hard to join it ever going to get to that point?
We have also heard that the finance minister cannot even define middle class, so how do the Liberals know what the middle class is? It is a pure talking point. If they say this narrative over and over again, it will somehow be true.
We talk about the potential for tax increases, in this case the employer health benefits and dental benefits tax, but there are others the Liberals could look at as well. I am talking about tax credits for employee stock options, a public transit tax credit, the Canada employment tax credit, the volunteer firefighter tax credit, the dividend gross-up tax credit, partial inclusion of capital gains, and the mineral exploration tax credit.
Do members know what buzz words the Liberals' use, again, as part of this narrative? They talk about it in terms of fairness and simplification. What does that actually mean? It means taking money out of Canadians' pockets. Hard-working, middle-class Canadians are having money extracted out of their pockets under the guise of fairness and simplification.
Aaron Wudrick, of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said, “Unfortunately, there are worrying signs that [Minister of Finance]'s real intent is to use 'simplification' as political cover to hike taxes by stealth for millions of Canadians”. In the case of this particular tax increase, it could potentially affect 13.5 million Canadians.
The truth is that there is only one party that protects the middle class, and there is only one party that has protected the middle class for as long as I have been an adult. The Conservative Party is the only true party that protects the middle class, and it is the reason I am a Conservative.
The Liberals often talk about taxing the top 1%, but again, this is more false information. That tax increase on the 1% was supposed to be revenue-neutral. The reality is that in six years, there will be a deficit of $8.9 billion. Who is going to pay that? Services go down, taxes go up. Ultimately, the middle class ends up paying for that.
What is interesting, and I have said this here before, and I know that the member for Winnipeg North has argued this, is the reality that those who benefit the most from the Liberal so-called middle class tax increases have been every one of the 338 members of this Parliament. It is actually those I would classify as upper middle-class Canadians, those earning $160,000 to $200,000, who have benefited the most from this. Those earning $45,000 have received nothing. I urge members across the way to stop this false narrative and tell Canadians the truth about what is going on.
There are other broken promises. There was electoral reform. We heard about that yesterday. There were going to be deficits of less than $10 billion annually. We know that story. There was going to be a balanced budget by 2019, but it will not be until 2055. They were going to save home mail delivery, another broken promise. They were going to immediately invest $3 billion over four years in home care. They were going to reduce the small business tax from 11% to 9%, another broken promise, and scrap the F-35 program. I could go on, but I know my time is short.
By the time the Liberals are done with the middle class, the Conservatives will have to clean up the mess and build the middle class back up, just like we did before. The Conservatives did this the last time a Trudeau was the prime minister, and we will have to do it again.