Mr. Speaker, I would like to split my time with the member for Winnipeg North.
The Liberal Party is very happy to support this legislation. It is a very important thing that we have to do here, to legislate some of the changes in the tax code. I do know that these are technical changes.
I would like to talk about something that I was told by someone who worked in the Department of Finance. If we look at how big the tax code was, going back several decades, we can see that it has gotten thicker. To some extent that should be expected because the economy is getting more complicated and there are always new ideas about how to improve the tax system. Sometimes it means that the tax system becomes a bit more complicated, but sometimes we figure out ways to make it easier to comply with the tax code by streamlining the rules.
I know this is an ongoing process. It is somewhat unfortunate that it has been a long time, 2001, since changes were made in legislation. It has been some time in coming, and as my hon. colleague from Burlington mentioned, it is about time. There was a bit of debate at the end of his speech about whether the changes should have occurred earlier, but, such as it is, now is the time that we have on the legislative calendar to make these changes.
It should be an ongoing process to look at the tax code, and to keep thinking about ways we can improve it, streamline it, and decrease the cost of compliance, the time it takes, the resources, and the people who have to be hired to comply with the tax code. As economists know, the payment of taxes, as well as the cost of compliance with potentially complex tax codes, is a dead-weight loss to the economy. It is a loss to our productivity.
If we can avoid it, all of these ways of streamlining our tax system can improve the performance of the economy and result in more wealth for the things we really need, such as health care, pensions, preparing for the future, protecting our natural environment, training our youth, and preparing our economy to compete against the rest of the world so that Canada can remain prosperous.
My hon. colleague from Burlington also mentioned a couple of things that I would like to refer to. He mentioned something I hear quite often from the government members, about tax savings to the typical family of $3,000 a year. However, what they fail to mention is that if we look a little more closely, these tax savings correspond to a family of four with two working parents and an income of $100,000 a year. Unfortunately, that is not the average family in a lot of places. In my riding, the median household income is only $60,000 per year.
My hon. colleague from Burlington raised a misleading figure in his speech. I know that it is not relevant to the topic of this bill, but I think that since my hon. colleague spent some time praising the government's tax policy, I should rebut what he is saying.
The problem is not only that the typical family does not make $100,000 a year and will not have received the $3,000 in tax cuts the government claims. Let us say that a family makes $100,000 a year. The family might have saved $3,000 a year in taxes. Multiply that by five years and it is about $15,000 in tax savings, but at the same time, this family of four's per capita share of the national debt has increased by $16,000. It turns out that it happens to be a little bit more than the tax savings. Even this family of four that is not typical that the Conservative government likes to use as a point of illustration is actually worse off once we take into account the fact that their share of the national debt has increased by more than the claimed tax savings. It is important to take the time in the House to rebut some of the myths propagated by the Conservative government. I appreciate this opportunity to have the time to do that.
I would like to address another issue in response to the speech by my hon. colleague from Burlington, and I must say that it was a good speech. It did not sound like a lot of speeches in the House, when people are reading and it sounds very mechanical and like words somebody else wrote. The member's speech was not one of those speeches. He follows the fine tradition in the House of speaking one's mind and speaking one's own words. I want to commend my colleague from Burlington for that.
I want to get back to another one of my colleague's claims, because he talked a lot about tax fairness. Tax fairness can be difficult to define. We heard from the member for Western Arctic, who asked questions of my hon. colleague from Burlington about the northern residence income tax deduction.
Depending on one's point of view, one can disagree about what is fair, what is not fair and what changes need to be made to make the tax code fairer.
One of the problems with the income tax changes the Conservative government has proposed and that the Conservative Party proposed in a past election campaign is the non-refundable tax credits for things such as art lessons, physical activity camps for kids, certain kinds of lessons for adults and tax-free savings accounts. I am very happy for my hon. colleague from Burlington's daughter who is now thinking about a tax-free savings account, which means that she is gainfully employed, which means that my hon. colleague is undoubtedly very proud and in many respects has done a good job as a father. However, the tax-free savings account is essentially a tax cut for people who have an income, and it is a bigger tax cut for people who have a larger income. It is debatable, and I would argue that it does not quite move in the direction of fairness. With many of the tax cuts the government has given to Canadians, people with higher incomes have benefited more than they really needed to if we were only thinking of fairness.
I had to take that time to respond to the speech by my hon. colleague from Burlington to say that it is not obvious to say what is fair and what is not. There is an argument to be made that what the government has done is not quite fair.
