Mr. Speaker, the government hopes that people will not ask any questions about where all the money will come from. The Prime Minister will just take out a fire hose and spray cash in all directions in the hopes that a grateful population will re-elect him and put him back in the Prime Minister's Office. Only days later, he will spring upon them a whole series of tax increases that they did not anticipate and that he did not mention.
That is why I rose to my feet today to ask the finance minister if he would simply commit that his original tax increases on small businesses were flawed and that they will never be introduced again. He could have just stood up and said that it was a mistake and he would not do it again; that we have his word that if they are re-elected there would be no new tax increases on small businesses. He could have just said that and sat down. Frankly, I would have been quite deflated. I do not know what else I could have asked at that point. Instead, when he stood up, he refused to answer the question at all. He rattled off a bunch of governmental talking points that had been handed to him by junior staffers in the Prime Minister's Office, but he did not rule out bringing back those tax increases. Therefore, the message for small business owners is not to tell us they were not warned. It is clear what the current government will do.
In fact, the original small business tax increases that small business owners fought in town halls and in street protests and in thousands of letters will probably be law by Christmas Day if this Prime Minister is re-elected.
The election is in late October. There will be a short session before Christmas. A Liberal government will want to do its most unpopular decisions between its return and Christmas so that it can hope everyone will forget about it four years later when they go back to the polls in 2023. Therefore, we know that is the window when this will happen. For small business persons out there somewhere working away, the warning goes out now that they have only four months to help stop the reintroduction of those tax increases that were devastating and even existential to their businesses.
This is consistent with everything the government has done. Already the average Canadian family is paying about $800 more in income tax alone. In fairness, people who are very wealthy are paying less. Wealthy taxpayers paid about $4.5 billion less in taxes in the year after the Prime Minister introduced his income tax changes, but everyone else is paying more. They lost their children's fitness tax credit, their public transit tax credit and their education and textbook tax credits. Small business owners now pay new penalties for saving within the companies, for sharing work and earnings with family members. They pay a carbon tax, for which there is no small business rebate. Payroll taxes are now on the rise.
Despite all of these Liberal tax increases on the middle class and on small businesses, there is still a shortfall. This is in an environment where real estate has boomed and the world economy has been on fire, all of which has caused a flood of unexpected revenues into government coffers. The Prime Minister blew every penny of those additional revenues and billions of dollars more.
Here we are in 2019, the year in which the budget was going to balance itself, and we have another $20-billion deficit. He put his hand on his heart and said he was looking Canadians in the eye and speaking truthfully to them as he always has, and that they would balance the budget in 2019. Those were the words of the Prime Minister at the Maclean's debate in the last election. He smashed that promise to smithereens. Thereafter, we cannot believe a single thing he says about money.
As the pressure mounts, the Liberals will start to deny it. They will deny it until they are red in the face, but the reality is that if the government is re-elected, there will be massive and crippling tax increases targeted on the working class and small businesses to fund ongoing, out-of-control spending. By contrast, Conservatives will put forward a plan that requires that the government live within its means, leave more in people's pockets and let them get ahead, and a free market economy that rewards merit rather than political connections and that puts people before government.