Madam Speaker, we believe that in principle governments should follow through on their promises, but we are not going to vote to endorse a promise that we think is problematic. Although we believe in the principle that the government should keep its commitments, if there is an aspect on a policy level that we have been consistent in saying we have concerns with, we are not going to suddenly change our position simply to align with something that happened to be a commitment that the government made.
The member suggested that benefits of economic growth have generally accrued to only the wealthy. I would ask the member to look at the information at least in a Canadian context, because I think sometimes we import data from other jurisdictions when we are coming to these conclusions about trends in terms of equality. I think one of the best measures of relative equality is something called “intergenerational earning elasticity”, which is the relative likelihood that a person who came from a wealthy family will themselves be wealthy, or that a person who came from a lower-income family will themselves be wealthy.
Canada has done better over the last 10 years than almost any other jurisdiction in the world when it comes to this real-time measure of economic opportunity. As well, real wages for middle-income Canadians went up substantially under the tenure of the Harper government. I think that is fairly clearly established in the data.
I do want to comment on the stock option issue but I think I am out of time, so maybe I will do that in response to the next question.