Mr. Speaker, I looked forward to the budget to find out where the Liberal Party stood. One of the questions was around the general sense of integrity, a promise made. It seemed we had to drag the Liberals to their promise of lowering the small business tax. For those who know their parliamentary history in debates over this issue, it was first proposed by Jack Layton and resoundingly rejected, until it was accepted by the Liberals as a good policy. We are always happy to lend good ideas to the Liberals to see if they will actually implement them.
Another promise was to close the stock option loophole. This was something the NDP proposed. We brought a motion forward in Parliament. The Liberals supported it and then campaigned on it. Canadians may not be familiar with this, because the vast majority of Canadians do not use stock option loopholes to avoid paying taxes, most of the people in the middle class or those working hard to join it, as the Prime Minister used to be fond of saying, have never encountered or enjoyed the privilege of stock options as their source of income, where they then pay a much lower tax threshold.
We proposed, in the last campaign, the idea of closing that loophole, and the Liberals eventually supported it. It is between $800 million and a billion dollars a year as forgone revenue from the government and shows very little economic benefit. My friend talked about opportunities and economic benefit. The Liberals promised to do this. The Liberals have said, as the Prime Minister did just recently, that we cannot fully support veterans because we simply do not have the means to do it. We cannot support more seniors, to lift them out of poverty, because the government says we do not have the means.
If the Liberals thought this was such a good idea that they campaigned on it, all as individual MPs in their ridings, and the finance minister said he was into it, where is it in the budget and why did they not do it?