Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to participate in this debate, and I will be sharing my time with the Minister of Employment and Social Development.

These are important questions we are dealing with, and obviously, there are a couple different philosophies at play here. While the Liberals and the NDP would increase taxes for the middle class, our job is to continue to cut taxes, which we have done 180 times or so since 2006, and we will continue to do that.

The reason the NDP is opposed to our plan is that EI rates will fall. The NDP wants to hike those kinds of job-killing EI premium taxes. Whether we call them fees or taxes, the impact is the same. It is money coming from workers, and it is money coming from employers, which would have a negative impact on job creation. The best social program in the world, of course, is an actual job.

I applaud my colleague, the member for Acadie—Bathurst, for his passion. I know he is sincere and believes passionately what he says. I applaud that. However, there are a couple of different ways of looking at it.

Premier Kathleen Wynne has talked about increasing mandatory CPP contributions, which is not the same as EI, obviously, but is in the same ballpark. They are going to force people to contribute, employers and workers, which will hurt the very people we are trying to help. These kind of payroll taxes would cost Canadian workers upwards of $1,000 or more, depending on how much they are making.

The NDP's real plan for employment insurance is a 45-day work year, which makes no practical sense at all. It would increase EI premiums for Canadian workers by billions of dollars, and that does not help create jobs.

Last fall, we introduced the small business tax credit, which reduced EI premiums for 780,000 small businesses. Of course, the high-tax parties opposed that cut. In budget 2015, our government reaffirmed our commitment to reduce EI premiums by 21% in 2017. That will promote job creation.

Some 99.8% of all businesses in Canada are SMEs, small and medium enterprises. Those are the folks who drive the Canadian economy. Those are the folks who provide the jobs that are so necessary to ordinary Canadians, who are, as we have heard today, all in the same boat, to varying degrees, putting food on the table, gas in the tank, and so on. Those are the kinds of people we need to spend the most time looking out for, and those are the people we are concentrating on in keeping taxes low, in keeping things like job-killing EI premiums and mandatory CPP contributions low, and we do not actually go to CPP, so that industry can continue to create jobs for the very kinds of people who everyone on all sides of this floor wants to help.

Laurie Hawn

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