moved:
That, given:
(a) 81% of middle-income Canadians are seeing higher taxes since the government came to power;
(b) the average income tax increase for middle-income families is $840;
(c) the government’s higher Canada Pension Plan premiums could eventually cost up to $2,200 per household;
(d) the government cancelled the Family Tax Cut of up to $2,000 per household;
(e) the government cancelled the Arts and Fitness tax credit of up to $225 per child;
(f) the government cancelled the education and textbook tax credits of up to $560 per student;
(g) the government’s higher Employment Insurance premiums are up to $85 per worker;
(h) the government’s carbon tax could cost up to $1,000 per household and as high as $5,000 in the future;
(i) the government’s intrusive tax measures for small business will raise taxes on thousands of family businesses all across Canada;
(j) this government tried to tax employer-paid health and dental benefits which would have cost up to $2,000 per household; and
(k) this government tried to tax modest food and discount benefits that retail employees receive from employers;
the House call on the Prime Minister to provide written confirmation that the government will not further raise any taxes on Canadians.
Mr. Speaker, before we buy a product, we have to know the price, and elections are no different. That is why politicians should tell Canadians the price tag before Canadians vote. The Prime Minister is not doing that, because he is afraid that voters will have sticker shock. Instead, he is trying to get voters to hand him a blank cheque before the election that he can cash after the election.
He learned this from his two mentors: Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne, the former Liberal premiers of Ontario. Their record was to double Ontario's debt; double electricity prices, driving the poor to food banks and our jobs out of the province; and of course, lying before every single of their four election victories about their future plans to raise taxes. This record led to the worst middle-class income growth of any province in the country and the highest poverty rate of any province in the country.
These consequences and these costs, unfortunately, were not known until after the elections were over, because these two mentors of our current Prime Minister would lie blatantly about their real plans and the true cost until it was too late for voters to do anything about it.
Who was the architect of this dishonest tax hiking strategy? It was Gerald Butts, the principal secretary to the current Prime Minister. He was the one who, behind the scenes, drafted the talking points and spun the media to trick everyone into believing that all the pre-election goodies promised would come for free. However, after the election was over, Ontarians again and again were hit with heavy bills that they had no reason to expect, and as a result, they were stuck paying for a product they would not have otherwise purchased.
How do we know that the Prime Minister will repeat the strategy of his two Ontario Liberal mentors? First, he has already started. He has begun raising taxes on middle-class Canadians, who are paying, on average, $800 more per family of four. These tax increases have targeted families where one spouse earns more than the other by cancelling income-splitting. They have taken away tax credits for kids' sports and arts, for university students' textbooks and some of their tuition costs, and for transit users, who lost their bus pass tax cred. Small businesses now face new penalties for saving within their companies or sharing the work and earnings with their family members. These same small businesses are paying higher payroll taxes for each employee and higher carbon taxes on their energy use, a cost that will not be compensated for with any form of rebate.
The government is fond of claiming that it will only tax rich people. Let us examine that very carefully. To believe that, we have to accept that soccer moms who put their kids in sports are all rich. They are the ones who lost the children's fitness tax credit. We have to believe that students who buy textbooks or pay tuition are rich, because that was the justification the Prime Minister used to take away their education and textbook tax credits.
We have to also believe that anyone on a bus is rich. According to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, that is the case. He claimed that only rich people were claiming the transit tax credit. I do not know when the last time was he was on a bus anywhere in Canada, but there are not a lot of millionaires and billionaires rolling around on public transit. I understand that the Prime Minister does not know that. He has probably never taken a bus. He has always had a driver, but it has never been a transit driver.
Our leader, of course, grew up in a family without a car, and he therefore took a bus everywhere he went as a kid. He would be able to tell the Prime Minister, as would most Canadians, that millionaires and billionaires do not typically ride around on public transit. It is not believable to suggest that only the rich paid more when the government cancelled the tax credit for public transit fees.
It is interesting, though, that Liberals talk about taxing the rich, because when they designed their tax policy, they specifically ensured that those with large family fortunes, like the Prime Minister, or those with billion-dollar companies, like the finance minister, would not face any new taxes. They were sheltered from the changes. That means higher taxes for those who take the bus, buy textbooks and put their kids in soccer, but those with a trust fund, a family fortune or a billion-dollar company are protected under the government's policies. When the government engages in class warfare, I think we can all agree that it is just a little bit rich.
This is even more true if we look at the actual data. CRA published data in the aftermath of the government's tax changes to ascertain how much people in various income groups are paying in taxes. This data, which was published in a front page Globe and Mail news article, found that the wealthiest 1% is paying $4.6 billion less in income tax after the tax changes that the government brought into play. In other words, those in the middle class are paying $800 more, while those who are part of the elite 1%, with trust funds, family fortunes or billion-dollar companies, are part of a group paying $4.6 billion less. The result of that broken promise is that everyone else has to pay more to make up for the hole left behind by the rich, who are getting breaks from the government.
The second way the Prime Minister is seeking a blank cheque is with respect to tax increases that he attempted to implement, but on which he was caught and therefore forced to put on hold. He attempted a 73% tax on the passive investments that small businesses make within their companies. Prior to the changes proposed, those businesses already paid an automatic in-year tax of 50.7% on all income they earned from investments in stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other passive instruments in which they set aside money for retirement, maternity leave, a rainy day or future active investments. They are already paying half of those gains in taxes, but the government wanted to tax them twice for the same dollar, bringing the full tax burden to 73%. Of course, I caught the Liberals. We caught them. Small businesses caught them, and as a result of the backlash, they put that change on hold.
They also considered taxing health and dental benefits and got caught. They put that proposal on hold. They attempted to take away the disability tax credit from diabetics, even though the law says that anyone who needs 14 hours of life-sustaining treatment and has diabetes is entitled to receive that tax credit. They even attempted to tax employee discounts so that the waitress who takes a 10-minute break at midnight and has a free chicken salad sandwich at the restaurant would have to pay income tax on that sandwich at the end of the year.
Do members want to know something else about all of these attempted tax increases that the Prime Minister has put on hold? He has not once stood in this place or anywhere else and said it was a mistake, that they were wrong and that he never should have contemplated them. He simply backed away temporarily because he knew the voter backlash would threaten his chances of re-election. However, with that election behind him, when he no longer needs voters but still needs their money, we can be sure he will bring every single one of those unjust and exorbitant tax increases right back, because he still believes they are the right thing to do.
Then we have the carbon tax cover-up. The government has released documents containing the true cost of the present carbon tax proposal. There is only one problem: It blacked out all of the numbers. Why would the government do that if it has nothing to hide? If Canadians are really going to get back in rebates what they pay in taxes, the government should be thrilled to have everyone know the exact cost of the tax, rather than just having some numbers published in government press releases. However, those numbers are still blocked out, and this government is under investigation by the Information Commissioner for its refusal to release that data.
That is just at the current rate of the carbon tax. The government currently admits that it would impose a $50-a-tonne carbon tax. However, that tax rate would lead this country to fall 79 million tonnes short of reaching its Paris accord commitments.
How do we make up the difference? According to a February 27, 2017, briefing to the finance minister, the carbon tax will have to increase in “severity” in order to reach the government's targets. That is right. The carbon tax is so ineffective at reducing emissions, it has to be significantly higher than the government admits in order to have its intended effect. That is why Conservatives are suspicious about the true post-election carbon tax rate, and there is more reason that we should be.
A 2015 Environment Canada briefing document said that the tax would have to rise to $300 a tonne, not $50 a tonne but six times higher at $300 a tonne. That is not only six times higher than the planned carbon tax, but 15 times higher than the rate that would be in place this year. Based on the government's own figures, a $300-a-tonne carbon tax would lead to a cost for the average family of $3,000 per year in Ontario and $5,000 a year in Saskatchewan. These higher costs would come in the form of increased gas, heat and grocery bills. Basically, anything that needs to be moved, heated or cooled would become significantly more expensive.
Herein lies the trick. Liberals will send people a few hundred dollars in rebates before the election and then give them $5,000 in higher costs after the election. Does that not remind everyone of the Kathleen Wynne-Dalton McGuinty scam I described at the beginning of my speech?
I will move to the next reason why we should expect higher taxes from the government if it is re-elected, and that is the runaway deficit. The reason Liberals raise taxes is that they have an insatiable appetite to spend other people's money. We have seen that so far. Government expenses are up by 25% in just three years and while the Prime Minister promised that the budget will balance itself in the year 2019, here we are and this year the deficit will be $20 billion and growing. Far from balancing the budget this year, Finance Canada now says that will not happen until the year 2040, two decades from now, when the national debt will be $1 trillion.
In fact, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, we will be spending two-thirds more on interest for the national debt within just four years. Forty billion dollars in interest to wealthy bondholders and bankers is good news if one is a rich guy that lends the government money, but bad news if one is the taxpayer paying for it and getting nothing in return. Forty billion dollars is a hard number to comprehend. To put it into perspective, that is what we spend on transfers to the provinces for health care, an absolutely astronomical sum of money vanishing from working-class taxpayers into the hands of wealthy bondholders.
We know what Canadians know, and that is that the Prime Minister broke his promise on deficits and he will break his promise on taxes. That is what Liberals do. The only way to pay for the exorbitant increase in debt will be with an increase in Liberal taxes after the election when they no longer need voters. This tax increase will cost Canadians a fortune and the current Prime Minister knows something about fortunes. He inherited one.
The Prime Minister's family wealth originated with his grandfather's petroleum empire, which is a great irony now that the Prime Minister is putting oil workers out of jobs and has blocked three pipelines. Three of the biggest worldwide pipeline companies were ready to put shovels in the ground when the Prime Minister took office and all three of them have left and taken their money and jobs with them down to Dallas and Houston. All of our exes are in Texas, and back here in Canada, we are unable to get our own product to market. The Prime Minister, ironically the same Prime Minister who has caused that heartache for petroleum sector workers, continues to live off of the fruits of his grandfather's petroleum empire.
Nobody should fault the Prime Minister's grandfather. He was evidently a brilliant entrepreneur who created wealth and opportunity for many of his peers in his time, which is all Canadians are asking for today. However, the one unfortunate consequence is that his grandson has no idea what it is like to live in the financial real world with everybody else. He believes budgets balance themselves because that is how it has always worked for him. He has never had to balance a household budget, so he believes budgets balance themselves. He has never had to worry about costs because he has always made others pay for his mistakes. He inherited a fortune and now he is costing Canadians a fortune.
Before one buys the brand name, one should know the real cost and also know that cost will not fully be understood until after the election. Also, there is no money-back guarantee. Instead of giving this Prime Minister a blank cheque, Canadians should elect a government with an affordable plan, one which forces itself to live within its means and make life more affordable so that Canadians can get ahead.
As Conservatives, we understand the cost of government leads to a higher cost of living. This is why we will run a government that lives within its means and according to the budgets of everyday Canadians, who work hard, pay their taxes and play by the rules. We will grow spending only at sustainable rates equal to or lower than inflation and population growth so that Canadians can keep more of what they earn and we can return to a balanced budget in a reasonable time frame.
That is how we make space for families and entrepreneurs to build their own dreams and ambitions. On this side of the House of Commons, we believe in a country based on meritocracy, not aristocracy; where small businesses and entrepreneurs get ahead by having the best product, not the best lobbyist; where businesses make a profit when they obsess over customers, not when they obsess over pleasing politicians; and where every Canadian can achieve his or her own ambitions without politicians standing in the way, but rather with a government standing by their side.