Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to engage in the debate today. It never ceases to amaze me that the government's hypocrisy has no bounds.
I thought I saw it all when two years ago the government voted against same sex marriage and then only a few days ago the government suddenly reversed its position and voted for same sex marriage.
Certainly, that was bad enough. However, the motion today is even worse. It was only in June that the Canadian Alliance introduced a motion in the House with this very same proposal and the government voted against the motion. Today, the government appears to be prepared to make the switch and support the motion.
It is really not hard to tell that there is not only a transition happening in the Liberal leadership, but an election is certainly in the air to encourage the government to do that.
However, the issue of gasoline taxes and where the taxes go is not a new debate in Canada. The Liberal government under former Prime Minister Trudeau many years ago placed a gasoline tax to pay for the creation of Canada's national oil company.
The government likes to play semantics with that tax. The reality is that that tax has never been removed. The purpose of the money may have switched in a different direction, but certainly the tax never disappeared and remains with us to this day. It goes into general revenue of course.
Then the new leader of the Liberal Party, the next Prime Minister, put a 1.5¢ a litre tax on gasoline to eliminate the deficit when he was finance minister. The deficit has been gone for a number of years. Amazingly, the tax remains.
The hypocrisy around the issue from government members, in particular the speech by the member for Erie—Lincoln I heard this morning, is quite amazing.
We are building a huge deficit in this country. Maybe the member for LaSalle—Émard has solved the fiscal deficit of the government. In fact, over the last many years we have been building a huge infrastructure deficit. It is the infrastructure not only of our roads but of our urban infrastructure, and the member referred to it earlier as our core infrastructure. There is a huge and growing deficit that needs to be addressed.
I guess I must applaud the government for coming around to that point of view. Again, I think it is hypocritical because it only does it when there is an election coming up. I am afraid that after the election if the government's position can flip that quickly one way, it can quickly flip the other way.
We must come up with a proposal. We had a proposal and, as a matter of fact, our proposal is Canadian Alliance policy no. 15 in our policy sheet. It proposes:
We will ensure that taxes which are imposed for a specific purpose should be used for that purpose alone, should be removed once no longer required, and not be allowed to be put toward general revenue.
This has been the Canadian Alliance policy for many years. It is a policy that we will implement when the Canadian Alliance becomes the government.
On the other hand, it is very hard to tell what is the government's position on this issue. The current Minister of Finance is quoted in a number of places saying that he does not support the proposal. He stated:
I know that the provinces really like the tax points, but sometimes, they forget about them. They really like them because they want us to impose the taxes and then let them spend the money.
Of course that is the old Liberal mentality: that government does not give money to anything unless it is tied with strings in some way that benefits the government itself. The Liberals find it difficult to dedicate money to anything that does not return a benefit for them. I think they forget sometimes that the money they are spending is not really their money. It belongs to the taxpayers. And there is only one taxpayer in the country.
While this country's huge infrastructure deficit continues to grow, so does the amount of money the federal government collects in gasoline taxes, both in excise tax at the pump and in GST. As my colleague just pointed out, there is GST on top of the excise tax and it is big. I believe the figures show that in this current year revenues from the excise tax and the GST will amount to $7 billion a year. While a minuscule amount of that is returned to some provinces for road infrastructure or infrastructure projects, the amount is very small.
In spite of the fact that there is an equalization program in the country which is designed to let all provinces provide relatively equal services to their citizens, amazingly enough in my province of Alberta the federal government collects half a billion dollars in gasoline taxes and does not return one red cent to that province for road infrastructure. I think the figure is that 98% of what the government does return, the paltry amount that it does return to fund infrastructure, goes to Quebec, Ontario and Atlantic Canada.
There is a real and fundamental unfairness in that formula. I think anyone could come up with a better and fairer scheme than that one.
Of course the government will always rave on about its notorious infrastructure programs that it has been implementing since 1993. While the programs did garner some popularity with municipalities across the country, mainly because the municipalities were desperate for money, those programs were tied to a sharing formula of one-third, one-third and one-third. In many cases, municipalities could not come up with the kind of money they needed to fund one-third of the projects and, therefore, that infrastructure could not be funded through the program.
I think our proposal is a good one. We appreciate that the government is coming around to our way of thinking and is prepared to support the motion, but I urge Canadians to look closely at the record of the government and the incoming prime minister, to look at the record on this issue and so many others. I suggest that the government is not to be trusted just because it chooses to make promises that Canadians across the country like to hear at election time. Its record of fulfilling those promises once it is elected is really quite dismal. I do not expect that on this issue it will be any different than it was on the idea to scrap the GST or any of the other promises the government has made over the years.
Our proposal to take an amount of three cents a litre, which has been suggested, is reasonable. The federal government should vacate that tax room on the condition that the provinces collect the three cents and pass it on to municipalities specifically for infrastructure funding. It would provide a long term and stable source of income for municipalities and would be a much fairer and more equitable system across the country than the political patronage system we have now. I urge all members to support our motion.