Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today and give my first full speech in this beautiful chamber on an important issue that is near and dear to the residents of my constituency of Edmonton Manning and Canadians all across our great country.
I have been spending a great deal of time out in the community, speaking to residents about the issues that are important to them. I spent the summer knocking on doors. Over the winter adjournment, I was again out connecting with the residents. One of the biggest issues I keep hearing about in my community is that life is getting more expensive and unaffordable for Canadians. There are fewer opportunities than there were only a few short years ago. People are worried about having enough money by the end of the month, and they do not know where they are going to save for their retirement, their children's education or even to buy their first home.
In my community, Canadians are under no illusion as to why they are not able to get ahead. The Liberal government's policies are chasing away investments in Alberta. It is a fact that investments in Alberta are next to zero. That means the loss of job opportunities. We can feel it when we go door to door and talk to Albertans.
What is happing right now is preventing the private sector from creating the well-paying jobs that Canadians rely on to keep a roof over their head and put food on the table. The Liberals are also raising taxes to pay for their out-of-control spending at a time when many members of the community can barely get by.
It is clear that the Liberal government is completely out of touch with the reality of everyday Canadians. I say that because I can see and hear that the government is trying to convince Canadians, as well as itself, with respect to the child benefit policy. The 2016 budget shows that it only gave $1 billion more to the child benefit program compared to the previous government. It eliminated three programs and replaced it with one. However, it has only given it $1 billion. That $1 billion divided by 36 million Canadians equals about $27 or $28 a year per capita. The government has convinced itself, and is trying to convince Canadians, that with that $28 it is going to fix the Canadian economy. It is a shame that the government thinks it is going to fix the Canadian economy with one single policy.
While there are numerous examples that I can draw upon, one that deserves to be highlighted happened this past Friday. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance said, without irony, that one of the reasons the Liberals scrapped the public transit tax credit was because it “benefited the wealthiest.” That is outrageous and shameful. The fact that the parliamentary secretary would even suggest that is insulting. It is an insult that is compounded when we consider that they took money out of the pockets of public transit users and then gave millions of taxpayer dollars to Bombardier to help ensure its executives received millions of dollars in bonuses. Imagine that Canadians had to lose their tax credit for giving their money away to a company that makes buses and trains. The government literally took hundreds of dollars out of the pockets of public transit users, who generally speaking were using it due to its affordability, to put millions of dollars in the accounts of corporate executives. It then had the nerve to come into this chamber and suggest to the shadow minister for finance, the member for Carleton, that it was a decision to get rid of a tax tool that was benefiting the wealthiest Canadians.
Now, over the course of the day, we have heard a great deal from the government benches about the Canada child benefit. I just spoke about how shameful it is for a government to try to base its economic policy and approach to building the Canadian economy on a single program such as this one.
We know that the government is telling Canadians that it is lowering taxes for the middle class and those aspiring to join it. Every time anyone points out the many ways that the Liberals have made life more expensive for Canadians, they point to this benefit to call them out. The parliamentary secretary did it on Friday to the members for Carleton and Louis-Saint-Laurent, and I would be very surprised if one of the members across the way did not rise in the time for questions and comments following my remarks to tell this House how many families in my riding receive the benefit and to the tune of how many dollars.
From an academic standpoint, it is an interesting argument, because the government is simply stacking logical fallacies and hoping it will get away with it. It starts with a red herring. We talk about its irresponsible tax policies that Canadians cannot afford, and it talks about the child tax benefit and suggests that some Canadians are getting more money than they were before it augmented the existing benefit that our former Conservative government put in place. After that, the government introduces the false dilemma that if some Canadians are getting more money under the augmented program, then there are lower taxes for everyone in the middle class and those aspiring to join it. Of course, that is not inherently true, or true at all, in this case. That is why they are called logical fallacies.
The government has done the same thing with the income tax rate. It lowered one number, but offset the savings that middle-class Canadians should have seen by eliminating tax credits and implementing other policy changes to make sure the Liberals would not have to curb their spending.
The Fraser Institute did an excellent job of outlining this in its 2017 report entitled “Measuring the Impact of Federal Personal Income Tax Changes on Middle Income Canadian Families”. The report concluded that 60% of the 3.88 million families covered in its study are paying more in taxes. Almost half of Canadian society is paying more taxes under the Liberal government's programs. The average increase is about $1,151 per family. The paper also considered just middle-income families, and found that 81% are paying more income taxes as well, to the tune of an extra $840 a year.
Clearly, Liberals are not just asking the one per cent to pay more, as they would like to have us believe. The numbers simply do not support the Liberal talking points, especially when we acknowledge that in the first year following the Liberals' tax changes, high-income earners paid $4.6 billion less in taxes than the previous year. One of the symptoms of mismanagement and miscalculation is when one tells Canadians that they are taxing the richest in the country while at the end of the day showing a loss of $4.6 billion in the financial statement's bottom line.
This does not even consider other measures such as the carbon tax and how this will affect Canadians' bottom line, or how the government's small business tax changes will adversely affect these incredibly essential job creators. For example, payroll taxes, CPP increases, EI premium increases, and passive income and income splitting were like war on small businesses in Canada. That is what the government was doing.
One thing we do know is that the government has tried to nickel and dime Canadians. That has been the notion of the government. It has been nickel and diming Canadians and small businesses for all they are worth. The previously proposed changes to the small business tax code would have been catastrophic, but, thankfully, due to outrage from coast to coast, the Liberals were forced to back down on some of their most economically harmful ideas.
That is one of the reasons we are here today talking about it.
I will be happy to take questions from my colleagues.