Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke.
We hear again and again, day after day, about how the government is going to help the middle class. The Prime Minister stands whenever he is here to talk about the middle class. I am not sure that anybody can believe anything that comes out of the Prime Minister's mouth, because he has not been very good at keeping his promises. Remember, this is the guy who promised just a little $10-billion deficit and to balance the budget within the mandate. Now we will see maybe $30 billion this year, and stretched out to 2055 that we will be in deficit.
This was the guy who was going to restore home mail delivery. We have not seen that yet. The various promises go on and on, such as the last election under first past the post. I could spend my whole 10 minutes talking about that, but that is not the point. The point is that the Liberals talk a lot about the middle class, but really do not even know who is in the middle class. I might be able to help with that.
In my opinion, the middle class is made up of people who are not poor and not the richest. In our country, we have a definition of who is poor: single people who make less than $23,000 or families who earn less than $40,000. We know who is rich. Those are the people in the highest tax bracket, which might be north of $138,000. There is a really good way to help the finance minister, who seems to have so much trouble figuring out who is in the middle class, so that Liberals could understand whether they are really helping them.
The latest suggestion is that they are going to put a tax on health and dental benefits, striking at the heart of what is important to Canadians. Canadians value health care. They think everybody should have access to basic health care. People need to be able to buy prescription drugs and get their teeth fixed, things the government should not be interfering in, because there will be serious consequences if we start taxing these kinds of benefits.
First, some employers are already squeezed. I will rage on that later in my speech. It does not take too much to get to the tipping point, when they will refuse to offer benefits anymore. Then there will be people who will not have any benefits at all. This is a horrible situation that many Canadians are already in, that they do not have benefits to start with.
Then individuals are going to have to pay an extra $1,000. My colleague, the member for Carleton, mentioned that people making $45,000 would have to pay an extra $1,000 if this tax were put in place. These people simply cannot afford to have additional taxes put on them. That is not to mention the fact that if taxes are put on these types of health benefits, with some people being less well than others and having a lot of health benefit claims, that would drive employers in a direction that is very dangerous in terms of determining whether they would provide coverage to someone who is extremely unwell. This is just a bad idea.
I was extremely happy to hear the Prime Minister state that the government was not going to follow through with this tax. However, with the question being asked 14 other times, hearing the skippity-do, getting no real answer, and then having everybody who responded to questions about that after the Prime Minister do that same dancing routine, I am a little concerned. It is definitely a bad idea and we do not want that, because people are already overtaxed.
A former member talked about the complexity of the tax act, the number of pages, and how nobody can really understand what is in it. When Canadians see their tax bills this year, they are going to be hugely surprised. All the rhetoric has been that the Liberals are helping the middle class, they have created a great child benefit, and they are lowering taxes on the middle class. They are giving people $900 and then taking away $1,100 for CPP taxes.
People with two kids in university would lose $10,000 of tax credit for education and another couple of thousand dollars for books. People who have two or three kids in hockey would lose nearly $3,000 of tax credit. A full-time employee whose spouse only works part time now cannot do income splitting. That is maybe $13,000. When we start adding all of that up, we are talking about thousands and thousands of dollars in additional taxes that people who have not been paying attention would not be aware of. When they get that bill, I think there will be rage in the machine for sure, because it is totally unacceptable.
On top of that, the Liberals want to squeeze small businesses, the generators of jobs. The whole point of going into deficit was to create jobs. Not one net new full-time job was created, but that was the whole point of all this spending. They started taxing small businesses, and that is another broken promise. They did not reduce the tax rate for small businesses. Then on top of that, the Liberals have added the CPP costs to employers, another cost that small businesses will have to bear. Now they are talking about a carbon tax. It is never ending.
The carbon tax will drive prices up on everything for everybody, for the people of Canada as well as for employers. When business people see their taxes this year, they are very squeezed. With what is happening in the U.S. right now, we are becoming uncompetitive. The U.S. is going to lower corporate and personal taxes, and it does not have any carbon tax. I do not know what is so complicated about this, that somebody who is supposed to be the finance minister cannot figure out this will make us uncompetitive.
I will give some specific examples from my riding that might help illustrate how this goes. With the threat of the Ontario cap and trade carbon tax, the $100 million expansion at CF Industries in my riding was cancelled. The company was quoted as saying it was for that reason. My riding has a $2 billion project with NOVA Chemicals that is scheduled to go ahead. It may create as many as 3,000 jobs in my riding. The company has said that with two levels of carbon tax, that project will likely go to the Gulf Coast. That is 3,000 Canadian jobs moving south. The carbon footprint does not leave the planet, but 3,000 jobs are moving south.
CF Industries takes natural gas and turns it into carbon dioxide and fertilizer. With the new carbon tax, it will be hugely burdened, and there is no way it can do anymore than it has already done. In the last 10 years, the company has made exponential reductions in its emissions and its environmental controls, and it is at the limit of its technology. With this extra carbon tax, we expect the facility will be shut down and will open its expansion in Donaldsonville, Louisiana where there is no carbon tax and there will be lower taxes for the corporation. Once again, the carbon footprint is not leaving the planet, just Canadian jobs.
In addition to that, I have a number of refineries in my riding. I hear the Minister of Environment and Climate Change say on a regular basis how Shell definitely supports a price on carbon. The refinery manager in Sarnia—Lambton believes that with the two levels of carbon tax we will see and the environment right now for oil and gas, the company, which has six other plants in the U.S., could de-bottleneck and shut this facility down just like it shut the facility in Montreal a few years ago.
I hear the rhetoric, but once again, that carbon footprint will not leave the planet, but jobs from Canada will move to the U.S. The carbon tax is a bad idea, and the government really needs to rethink that in light of what is happening in the south.
The Liberals are getting a lot of advice from people telling them what to do. The Chamber of Commerce is the representation of all our businesses across Canada. It has said that a carbon tax is a bad idea as are these health and dental taxes. The Liberals are getting that input from the chamber. They are getting it from the Canadian group of municipalities, the FCM. All of these people are giving the government excellent advice, saying that it should not do these things, that they are bad for small business, which creates most of the jobs, and for the people. I do not know about the other MPs here, but I get letters on a daily basis from people complaining they are on fixed incomes and have no more room to move.
I am happy for an opportunity to talk today, but I wish somebody on the other side of the aisle were listening and would actually take action, do the right thing for Canadians and eliminate the carbon tax, reduce the tax burden on people, and reduce the tax burden on small businesses, so we could do what the government was elected to do, which is create jobs for Canadians.