Madam Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to go over our electoral platform for the benefit of all members in the House.
The NDP is often asked how it will pay for these things, but no mention is ever made by the Liberals or the Conservatives about the current low corporate tax rates. That fits in nicely with the infrastructure programs I talked about earlier. A large number of the infrastructure that exists in Canada has been funded by the taxpayers. A lot of that infrastructure, such as the bridges and the rails we have built, benefit corporations because they are able to move their goods efficiently.
However, the fact is that we have put all that public money into that infrastructure and we still have a very low corporate tax rate. Therefore, what we argued in the NDP was that corporations, particularly the very wealthy ones, should pay a bit more to ease the burden off the rest of society. For far too long, we have had this trickle-down economic theory where we think that if we lower the corporate tax rate to these really low levels, somehow all of this money will magically trickle down to the lower classes. Instead, as the former governor of the Bank of Canada has pointed out, the corporate bank accounts are simply swashing full of millions of dollars right now, which is dead money not being reinvested into the Canadian economy. We asked for fairness, and that was what we ran on.