Editor:

The Harper Conservative government has recently introduced a federal tax credit billed as the "Family Tax Cut" (income splitting) that will allow a higher-income spouse to transfer up to $50,000 of taxable income to a spouse in a lower tax bracket. The credit provides up to $2,000 for couples with children under the age of 18 and is effective for the 2014 tax year. This will cost public coffers about $2.4- billion in 2014-2015 and roughly $2-billion per year until 2019-20. This uses up a vast sum of the (alleged) coming surplus on one inequitable tax program.

This act, as hyped by the Conservative government, supposedly would save some 43 per cent of all families with kids tax dollars. But, as written by Andy Blatchford from the Canadian Press "Income splitting will not benefit 2.4 million two-parent families and it will not benefit any single parent families." The fact is single parents, those below taxable incomes, and couples with equal income or with children 18 or older will get nothing. According to an analysis done by Queens University Law School Professor Kathleen Haley "income-splitting won't help parents who really need a tax break, the top 20 per cent of families with income over $140,000 would get 43 per cent of the estimated $2.4 billion a year, even with the $2000 cap on benefits. Men would get 87 per cent of the additional income." The C.D. Howe Institute back as far as 2011 stated that "85% of all households would gain nothing." Jonathan Rhys Kesselman authored a report for the Caledon Institute of Social Policy that found 87.1 per cent of all households would fail to gain anything from this tax cut. Rick Smith, the executive director from the Broadbent Institute said, "If the government set out to specifically design a policy to make inequality worse, this would be it." Even Justin Trudeau has stated "85 per cent of Canadian households wouldn't see any benefits from the Conservative government's proposed income-splitting plan." Question, what province would be the biggest winner of this income-splitting plan? Alberta! The adopted home of our Prime Minister. Strange? Not really.

Jim Flaherty, the highly praised former Conservative finance minister, stated concerning income-splitting "Its an interesting idea. I'm just one voice. It benefits some parts of the Canadian population a lot. And other parts of the Canadian population virtually not at all." "I think income-splitting needs a long, hard analytical look ... to see who it affects in this society and to what degree, because I'm not sure that, overall, it benefits our society." So even Jim Flaherty cast doubts on this ill-advised tax policy.

Our PM's backbench parroting puppets (MPs) are touting the income splitting announcement as good news for many of their constituents. The word "many" as described in dictionaries is "a large number of," "the majority of people." So these Conservative backbenchers have stated that the majority of people in their area will benefit from this income-splitting plan by the Harper Conservative government. Let's take a look at the Bruce-Grey-Own Sound area as an example. The only statistics I could find concerned Owen Sound and was from the year 2012. As an aside probably the last useful stats as this Conservative government has killed the long form census thus we will not get any useful relevant data to make sound decisions in the future. Then again maybe that is why the Conservatives killed the long form in the first place. But I digress. The national average wage in that year was $75,450. Owen Sound was 18% below the national average ($67,631), it has a per capita value of $28,287.

We read in our local papers that Safe and Sound provides a free lunch five days a week to around 55 people per day. OSHaRe, another charitable agency, provides a free supper five days a week to between 90 to 110 people daily. Owen Sound Hunger and Relief Effort has a nightly soup kitchen and is appealing for supplies. We see various requests from all of the food banks in the BGOS area due to the high demand for food. There are twenty, that's right twenty active food banks in BGOS. We read that there is a soaring request for emergency funds for utilities and rent to help low-income residents of BGOS but all funding for this has run out. The United Way and Safe 'n Sound are making appeals for winter wear, boots, mitts, hats, warm socks etc. Good paying full time jobs are scarce. Some people, are working more than one part time job just to survive. Does this new tax plan sound like it would benefit the majority of the people in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound? Hardly!

By saying that many (majority) of the constituents in area like BGOS would enjoy the benefits from income-splitting would normally be laughable if it was not for the plight of many of the people here. That is an egregiously callous statement by these Conservative MPs considering the delicate state of the economy for the vast majority not only of the people in the BGOS area but Canada has a whole. But what can one expect from these Conservative MPs whose base salary is $163,700 plus an additional $11,500 for being a chair of a committee ($175,200), or Parliamentary Secretary an additional $16,300 ($180,00), or a Cabinet Minister an additional $78,300 ($242,000) plus a car allowance for the Minister, of course, and they all get a gold plated fully indexed retirement pension, all of this on your hard earned dime. Not a bad salary for just being a yes man (a vote) to the PM instead of being an MP who actually represents your concerns to the Conservative government.

This is just a bad tax plan because it makes the rich get richer. It is targeted to Harper's base. It is vote buying from a desperate government. Could not this money have been put to a better use? Universal day care, eliminating lower income tax payers from the tax roles, decreasing income tax rates for all, increasing payments to the Canadian health care system or eliminating child poverty. Is it not time Canadians woke up and got rid of an out of touch government?

Richard Hutchison
Georgian Bluffs