Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, I also grew up in a family business and I appreciate some of the points overall. I have been listening to speeches all day and the references to job creators, to businesses. Right now we have very low corporate tax rates, lower than other countries in the OECD. As a result of the corporate profits from any company in the U.S., they now have transferred those corporations from paying taxes to Canada to paying taxes to the United States.
Economists from Mark Carney, our former bank governor to the RBC economist look at what has happened. Corporations are not reinvesting that money in hiring Canadians. They are not job creators. These deep tax cuts are where jobs go to die. It is now called dead money. Over $600 billion in dead money, an astonishing 32% of GDP, is not being used by those corporations to create jobs to invest in Canada to modernize.
I wonder when the Conservative Party is going to recognize that this is a failed strategy and that there is no empirical evidence whatsoever that its strategies are creating jobs.
Stella Ambler: Mr. Speaker, I would disagree that there is no empirical evidence. The evidence is in the numbers, over one million net new jobs created. We talk about it a lot because it is really important. We are talking about lowering taxes for small business. We are talking about lowering taxes 160 times for ordinary average Canadians.
If my friend and colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands does not believe that lowering corporate taxes for businesses creates jobs, then we do have a fundamental disagreement. I think that when government takes away from the bottom line of corporations or businesses, they are going to look into reinvesting that and expanding. When they expand and reinvest, they need to hire more people. That is how it works, and that is why we lower the taxes.