Jason Kenney

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have two simple and direct questions for the hon. member.

First, does she agree that a family is an economic unit?

Does the member agree that the family constitutes an economic unit and should be treated as such in the tax code? Second, would an NDP government repeal the policy of income splitting for pensioners?

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, there we go: “the very, very wealthy”. A constituent of hers, a family in her riding, making $50,000 would save $500 in income taxes through family tax fairness. Only the NDP could consider someone with a $50,000 family income as very wealthy, which is code for “we have to raise their taxes so that they are not very, very wealthy anymore”.

That is why NDP tax-raising policies are always against the advantage of people who actually want to be in the middle class.

Let us be clear. Family tax fairness is not about a preference for certain families or people at certain income levels. It is about eliminating discrimination. It is about fairness. It is about treating people equally. It is about treating the family as an economic unit. If the NDP says it supports kitchen table economics for working families, why will it not treat families as an economic unit in the tax code?

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, indeed, the universal child care benefit has been massively popular for exactly that reason. It helps parents to make that choice. Admittedly, it is at the margin. It is not going to make a fundamental difference, but it helps. It helps a whole lot more than taxing families.

By the way, regarding the plans of the opposition parties to create a so-called “universal government Ottawa knows best child care scheme”, according to the advocates of this so-called child care, 1% of GDP would cost at least $18 billion. Guess what? That money is not grown on trees. It is not printed by the Bank of Canada. That money would come out of the pockets of taxpayers.

Do members know what would happen? The opposition would end up raising the GST back. It would take away the child care benefit. It would remove income splitting for seniors. It has pretty much admitted that now, since it is against income splitting. It would raise taxes on families in order to give them a punitive benefit. Who would the big winners be? The big government unions.

We will not let that happen.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, to correct the member, we have not raised the age of eligibility of OAS. We will be doing so in nearly two decades' time. It will be a gradual phase-in.

When the OAS system was designed in the 1960s there were seven retirees for every beneficiary and the average life expectancy was age 65. By the time we raise OAS eligibility to age 67, there will be one beneficiary for every working Canadian. The average age of life expectancy is now 76 and is going higher. Therefore, the Liberal Party's opposition to the modest, gradual increase in the age of eligibility for OAS is a fundamental reflection of how this is no longer the Liberal Party of Paul Martin and how this is no longer a Liberal Party of sound economic management.

Governments across the world, including social democratic governments of the left and centre-left all through Europe, in Japan, and elsewhere, have all moved to increase eligibility ages for such public entitlements analogous to old age security to reflect reality. That life expectancy has grown by well over a decade in every one of those countries and the working taxpaying population has shrunk. Rather than just demagoguing on this issue, it is incumbent on any party that aspires to be government to tell us how they would pay for the entitlements of baby boomers if we do not have an age of eligibility that reflects growing life expectancy 15 and 20 years from now.

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, there we have it, the finance critic for the official opposition, for the NDP, saying that families making $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year are wealthy. If I were making $60,000 a year, like most public sector union members who are the core of the NDP's constituency, I would be terrified of this guy becoming the finance minister because he thinks they are wealthy. We know that means that the NDP would impose bigger taxes.

We heard the same thing from the leader of the Liberal Party. He said he would not impose taxes on the middle class. Then when he was asked to define the middle class, he said that it excludes people who have assets like seniors on fixed incomes.

The data is clear. In the past decade there has been shrinking income inequality, fewer children living under the low-income cut-off than ever in our history, and the lowest level of families under the LICO in 30 years.

I have a question for my NDP friend. If he were in government would he repeal income splitting for pensioners?

[Business of Supply, June 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to the official opposition's motion.

The government is obviously against the motion. The premise of the motion is incorrect. It states:

That, in the opinion of the House, the drastic increase in income inequality under recent Liberal and Conservative governments harms Canadian society...

There is no drastic increase in income inequality. Income inequality has not increased in Canada in recent years. On the contrary, income inequality has decreased in Canada in recent years.

The problem is that the motion is based on the NDP's political ideological. It is not based on data, facts or statistics, which clearly show that income inequality has decreased in Canada.

In fact, contrary to what the motion would suggest, we have seen a reduction, not an increase, in so-called income inequality in Canada. The truth is that in the past many years, the Canadian economy, notwithstanding the impact of the largest global recession since the 1930s, has done quite well, as a rising tide has lifted all boats.

We see that Canadians are generally better off in terms of their income. Canadians overall are significantly better off in terms of their net worth and assets. The lowest-income Canadians are better off as well. In fact they are closer to the mean than they used to be.

Child poverty is at an all-time low in Canada. The number of people living below the low-income cutoff, often referred to as the poverty line, has diminished. The government has eliminated nearly one million people from the tax rolls altogether, so they do not have to pay taxes, by increasing exemptions and other progressive measures in the tax system.

The entire premise of the NDP motion is incorrect. In fact, families at all income levels had higher incomes in 2011 than prior to the recession, according to Statistics Canada. With robust income growth, the share of Canadians living in low-income families was at 8.8%, according to the most recent figures, the lowest level in three decades. Let me repeat that. The number of Canadians living below the low-income cutoff line is at its lowest level in 30 years.

That is not my opinion. That is not a figment of my imagination. That is a fact based on data from Statistics Canada. I would invite my friends from the NDP to actually contend with the facts on this matter, rather than reciting stale and misleading talking points.

That is not to say that we should be satisfied.

Of course, as a society, as a government and as parliamentarians, we must always work to improve the living conditions and economic opportunities for all our citizens, including, and particularly, those living with low incomes.

That said, we need to recognize that we have made progress and that the percentage of Canadian families living below the low-income cutoff has diminished.

Indeed, the median real income of Canadians, and this is very important, according to the recent study conducted by the Luxembourg Income Study and The New York Times, hardly a Conservative house organ, indicated that for the first time in history, Canadian median family incomes have exceeded those of the United States.

The American dream was always considered the gold standard in terms of middle-class prosperity around the world. However, according to this recent exhaustive study of all the available data, the Canadian middle class is better off than its counterpart in any other major developed economy in the world, having exceeded that of the United States. This did not happen by coincidence or accident. It happened, of course, because of the hard work of Canadians but also because of the prudent economic policies of Canadian governments, and I would submit this government in particular, which has reduced enormously the tax burden on Canadian families. We have reduced the tax burden, through 160 separate tax relief measures, by an average of $3,400 for an average family of four per year. That is not cumulative. That is to say that year after year, the average Canadian family is paying $3,400 less in federal taxes than it did when our government came to office, and that happened because we made necessary but prudent decisions to better manage our spending and decided that taxpayers would come first.

Here is the basic problem with the motion in front of us. The NDP's view is that government should come first and that we should feed the insatiable appetite of government bureaucracies and programs by taxing people more. That is what drives policies that lead to unemployment, stagnant incomes, and fewer economic opportunities.

Fundamentally what this government believes at its core is that hard-working families know better how to spend an extra dollar than politicians or bureaucrats do. New Democrats have a different view. It is a defensible view. It is a view they sometimes obscure at election time, but their fundamental view is that they know better, as politicians, how to spend that extra dollar than working moms and dads do.

Take, for example, the issue of daycare. The NDP and its Liberal friends on the left believe that we should raise taxes on hard-working Canadian families, so that they have to work harder and their after-tax disposable income shrinks, so that we can take that tax revenue, coercively taken from those families, and cycle it through the enormously expensive bureaucracy of the Ottawa government and then send it to the bureaucracies in the provincial governments, which will then cycle it through various programs. In the case of Manitoba, I recall the failed child care policy of the former Liberal government. What did it end up doing? It raised government union wage rates in the child care sector. It did not actually add a single child care spot.

Again, that is a defensible view. It is a view my friends on the other side will articulate. They believe that we should put more economic pressure on hard-working families, more stress, and reduce their take-home pay by increasing their taxes in order to cycle all of that money through two bureaucracies and send it back out in the form of a putative public benefit, when huge amounts of those resources have, in fact, been absorbed by administration and bureaucracy.

Our approach is different. Our approach is to leave the money in the hands of mom and dad in the first place, because we believe that they are the best experts with respect to child care, not government bureaucracies or politicians. That is why we introduced the universal child care benefit that sends a $100 cheque per child under the age of six to every family, which then gets to decide how to spend that themselves, rather than politicians and bureaucrats making that decision for them. It is very simple.

It is also why we raised, by the way, the basic personal exemption. One of the issues I am going to get to is so-called income splitting, what I call family tax fairness. Under the status quo and a Liberal unfair tax policy, it is unbelievable but true that they actually used to say that a spouse working outside the home was of greater value to our society and economy than a spouse working at home.

They reflected the perceived devaluation of dads and moms who work at home by having a lower spousal exemption in the tax code than the basic personal exemption. For a two-income family with one spouse out in the paid workforce and another at home in the unpaid workforce, guess what? The person in the paid workforce would get a higher basic personal exemption against their income taxes than the spouse at home in the unpaid workforce. What kind of weird mentality says that dads or moms who are at home taking care of their kids or their elder relatives are worth less for making what is for many of them a sacrificial decision for their families?

We believe that they are serving the common good, that such dads and moms are making a choice that is best for their families, which we should respect and not penalize. We should respect the choices families make and not penalize them for making choices that they think are best for themselves. That is why this government eliminated that one dimension of family tax unfairness when we raised the basic spousal exemption to be equivalent to the basic personal exemption.

These are some of the reasons we have seen an increase in average family income and net worth. In fact, the median net worth of Canadian families has increased by 45% in real inflation-adjusted terms since 2006. Canadian children from poor families have a higher probability of moving up the income scale than in such comparable countries as the U.S., U.K., France, or Sweden. That is to say, not only do we have fewer Canadian families and children living in poverty than before, and not only are we at a record low in child poverty in this country, but we have greater upward social mobility for those families. We actually do have the Canadian dream.

This is what The New York Times was so astonished by when this study came out last month. The so-called American dream, the notion of upward mobility for low-income families, had become much more of a dream than a reality. However, here in Canada, it is a reality. We continue to have a society characterized by such upward social mobility.

The facts are that the middle class in Canada is doing better. There are fewer poor families and fewer poor children and less income inequality, regardless of what the opposition says.

I would like to talk about the second part of the NDP's motion, which states:

...and that the House express its opposition to the Conservative income splitting proposal which will make this problem worse and provide no benefit to 86% of Canadians.

Once again, the premise of the motion is incorrect. The New Democrats are wrong. They are mistaken.

With the premise of this motion, the opposition is simply wrong.

I find it very interesting that in the political rhetoric and positioning of the NDP, those members always talk about working families. The late Jack Layton, whose memory we honour, always focused on kitchen-table economics. In the last election, he visited a lot of families around their kitchen tables, yet the position of the NDP here today could not be clearer: it does not actually support the family as an economic unit. Those members actually think that some families should be actively discriminated against through unfair preferences in the tax code. We fundamentally disagree.

That is why, in our 2011 election platform, the Conservative Party of Canada committed that if we balanced the budget, we would, at the end of our mandate, introduce family tax fairness by allowing splitting of income between two-parent families.

As the Prime Minister has done, I am pleased to reconfirm that it is absolutely our intention to keep that commitment that we made to Canadians in the last election to introduce family tax fairness, to end the discrimination against certain families, to end the unfairness.

How do we do that? I would like to accept the rhetoric of the NDP position and turn it into policy substance. When New Democrats talk about kitchen table economics and the importance of supporting working families, we do not just do that rhetorically, we want to do that substantively. We do not want to do it as a political tactic or trick. We want to do it by amending the tax code to say that we will treat the family as an economic unit, because after all, it is an economic unit. Is that not the point? Dads and moms who arrange their affairs together as couples with kids or other dependents are making a choice to share their property, to share their income, to share the burdens of life. In so doing, they become the best social programs, the best schools, the best crime prevention programs in raising children.

There is no social program that produces stronger social outcomes than a strong family. Can we all agree on that? We should be honouring and respecting the often difficult and sacrificial choices that families make. That is what family tax fairness through income splitting seeks to do.

What does this mean? Right now, perhaps a dad in a family decides to stay at home to take care of young, pre-school children, or perhaps elderly dependent parents who are living with the family, and we will see more and more of that with the aging of our society. His wife or his spouse goes out and works and makes, let us say, $75,000 a year, which is not much above the average income level in Canada. I do not know why New Democrats are laughing. It is a lot less than they make as MPs. If the wife is the income earner making $75,000 a year and dad is at home taking care of young kids or maybe elderly parents, they end of paying 30% more in taxes, $2,000 more in taxes than a family making the same amount of revenue with both parents in the paid workforce.

What this so-called preference, what this discrimination, what this unfairness does is say that the work the dad puts in at home does not have any economic value. The government says it is worth nothing.

I am not just saying this. I will never forget being in the opposition as revenue or finance critic asking the Liberal government why they permitted this tax unfairness against such families. The then minister of state for finance, the hon. Jim Peterson, for whom I have great regard, committed the ultimate political gaffe. He accidentally told the truth. He actually said the government believed that stay-at-home parents were not working. I guess he had never met a stay-at-home dad or mom, because they work harder than most of us do every single day of the week and they deserve our recognition and our support.

That is why the Royal Commission on Taxation in 1966 recommended that the appropriate tax unit should be the family, as the income and expenditure of two individuals are not independent when they live together. That is why the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 60 years ago, supported elective joint taxation, voluntary income splitting. It is why the U.K. and France and most other developed countries treat the family unit as an economic unit for purposes of taxation.

It is about time that we said we value families, we support the choices they make, and we will end the unfairness. Will the opposition join us in that?

[Employment Insurance, June 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the professional public servants at Service Canada are not acting in bad faith. They are acting in good faith. The rules are there to support unemployed workers who have lost their job through no fault of their own. Clearly, cases can be appealed before the Social Security Tribunal.

However, I will look into this particular case and share my findings with the hon. member.

[Employment Insurance, June 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am not familiar with this particular file, but I will look into it and provide the honourable member with the facts.

[Employment, June 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, it would take a Liberal to understand abuse. After all, it was the Liberal government that created the stripper program. This is not just some kind of a talking point; this is a reality. The Liberals actually systematically issued, every year, hundreds of work permits for typically easily exploited women from developing countries to come to Canada in an industry with close linkages very frequently to organized crime. When there was a public outcry about it, the Liberals defended the program. That is the Liberal track record. It is indefensible.

[Employment, June 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the member has it entirely backward. It was the Liberals that did nothing. They had no penalties. They had no blacklist. They had no enforcement. They created the general lower-skilled stream. This government created the blacklist.

He is absolutely wrong, and I will give him the example of the Boathouse Restaurant in Fenelon Falls, Ontario, which was put on the blacklist because of an RCMP investigation into human trafficking and abuse of workers. It is on the blacklist because of that, and I just approved more non-compliant companies to be put on the blacklist last week.

In terms of the provinces, I have written to them repeatedly to ask that they share information with us about abusive employers.