The February 28th federal budget can only be described as a victory for each and every one of Canada's 15 million taxpayers who will benefit, albeit modestly, from the most significant tax relief and tax reform in over a decade. The personal tax relief measures include:

Restoring full indexation to the tax system retroactive to January 1, 2000;

Lowering the middle income tax rate from 26% to 24% on July 1, 2000 and further reducing this rate to 23% over the next five years;

Raising the Basic Personal Exemption - the amount you can earn tax-free in a year - to $8,000 over five years;

Raising the middle and high income tax bracket thresholds from $35,000 and $70,000 over the next five years;

Eliminating the 5% surtax for people with income between $65,000 and $85,000 effective July, 2000 and reducing the surtax to 4% for those taxpayers making over $85,000;

Increasing the RRSP foreign content limit to 25% in 2000 and 30% in 2001; and

Reducing the capital gains tax inclusion rate from 75% to 66%.

Clearly, Canada is finally on the road to lower taxes and greater prosperity. The government has taken concrete steps to address the issues of brain drain tax competitiveness, and declining living standards. But we have a long way to go - personal taxes in Canada have increased by 140% in real terms since 1961. Taxpayers cannot afford to be complacent, there is still a lot to do.

We should give credit where credit is due, federal Finance Minister Paul Martin has finally turned the corner with this budget. It just goes to show that citizen and taxpayer advocacy can make a difference.

Perhaps the biggest victory was the death of "bracket creep". Bracket creep resulted from government policies that prevented tax brackets, exemptions and credits from moving upwards with inflation. So if you were fortunate enough to receive a cost of living increase in your income to keep pace with inflation, you were actually being pushed into higher tax brackets and paying more tax even though your real spending power remained the same.

But thanks to pressure applied by the CTF and others demanding the government restore full indexation to the federal tax system, bracket creep will no longer drain billions out of our pockets without our knowledge or consent. If bracket creep had not been killed, all other tax cuts would have been phoney and temporary - slowly and quietly taxed back by the government over time as inflation rises.

But while taxpayers have finally made some gains on the tax relief side of the equation, action on reducing Canada's massive $577 billion debt is still sorely lacking. This budget dedicates a mere $3 billion to debt reduction, and only if it is not spent on other things first. At the current pace it will take over 150 years to pay off our country's accumulated debt.

Also worrisome for taxpayers is the fact that the government continues to grow: $20 billion in new spending over the next four years, on top of $30 billion in new expenditures contained in the last three budgets. We say any new initiative or reinvestment into our valued programs like healthcare should come from cutting the billions wasted on corporate welfare and job grant boondoggles.

Reams of new spending and the lack of meaningful debt reduction are the biggest disappointments in what is otherwise a budget that responds at least in some measure to the demands and needs of Canada's most valuable resource - it's taxpaying citizens.