Gerry Ritz

[Taxation, May 11th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the government's balanced approach has raised taxes 60 times in the last 6 years. Revenues have grown by over $40 billion a year. The surplus has never been bigger.

For all our hard work, Canadian taxpayers get a health care system in jeopardy, increased student debt, high unemployment and reduced coverages, Canadian agriculture in crisis, east and west coast fisheries that are dying and no national highways program.

Where has all the money gone?

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, May 10th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to finally get a chance to speak to the government's attempt to revise and update the Young Offenders Act. Contrary to popular belief, this is something for which Canadians from coast to coast to coast have been calling for years, not just cowboys from western Canada.

I find it ironic that my party gets abused for this. We are portrayed as insensitive and tough minded when it comes to criminals, yet the first thing the Liberals do when they trot out their latest effort is to brag about how tough minded it is. I guess we could say that it is pretty insensitive too, but in this case it is insensitive to the wishes of a majority of Canadians and certainly my constituents who are looking for a little more meat on the bones.

The youth criminal justice act like other legislation that has percolated up through months or years of consultation and study contains a germ of good intentions. Section 6 formalizes the role of police to correct the actions of young offenders who have committed minor infractions.

Over the last few years our justice system has been bogged down with the rights of the criminal to the point that police find themselves on the defensive after carrying out their duties. What was acceptable on one occasion is found unacceptable by a later court. This process has made the officer's ability to deal with people frustrating and time consuming.

At a town hall meeting one year ago my constituents told me that for first time and minor offences rehabilitation is the top priority. Local authorities must have the option of running programs that suit local conditions and that bring young offenders face to face with their victims and the impact of their thoughtless actions. It is kind of based on the sentencing circle model we see being used in the aboriginal communities.

I was told that young people must have respect for the justice system. I believe that is something which cannot be started young enough. The problem with Bill C-68 is that it leaves this concept up to a variety of jurisdictions, a lot of them overlapping, and it includes no money to encourage a system of diversionary programs.

We are all in favour of civil rights and no one wants to see anyone victimized by overzealous authorities. Unfortunately what we too often see these days is the concept of human rights being twisted and reinterpreted to what is more acceptable to special interest groups and their particular needs rather than the acceptance of everyone as being equal under the law. This undermines the job of the police which is to keep the general peace and apply the law equally to anyone who breaks it.

Young criminals see that concept operating and lose respect for the law while they take advantage of the loopholes. I realize these are qualifications. There is such a thing as diminished capacity that suggests younger people cannot frame the moral implications of what they are doing with the same sophistication as a mature adult, but this does not mean there should be no consequences, only different ones. I would hope the young people of the country still have enough respect for the police to listen and alter their behaviour when a man or a woman in blue comes calling.

In rural areas, allowing police to use discretion and deal openly with the young offender and his parents may save a lot of time and trouble. The problem then becomes whether we can be assured there will be enough officers to go around. With the financial abuse suffered by the RCMP at the hands of the government it is not a hopeful picture. Bill C-68 does not promise any relief for hard pressed police forces in this respect, or community programs for that matter.

It is ironic that the justice minister would choose to number this bill with the same designation as the previous gun control bill. We see over $200 million being wasted there when it could certainly help prevent crime by being invested in our youth.

I congratulate my colleague from Crowfoot for his excellent work in bringing forward the perspective of frontline police officers. His name is not on the bill but his ideas are certainly stamped there. Maybe in his lifetime we will see real change in the country, in the words of the minister, “in a timely fashion”.

I notice in section 8 the crown prosecutors may likewise be authorized to issue cautions rather than proceed with court action. This can be different from province to province according to the whims of each attorney general and can undermine the work of the police. I realize that criminal cases cannot go forward on the exclusive say-so of the police, but we do see instances where overworked crown attorneys trade off low profile cases for higher ones to the frustration of the frontline officers. I also note there is a great deal in the bill about diversion or, as the government terms it, extra judicial measures.

Contrary to government spin, I do not believe that any of the Reformers or the two million Canadians who voted for us are interested in filling our jails with young people. That is not the answer. We had the unfortunate spectacle of the justice minister claiming we want to jail 10 year olds and I am sure even she regrets playing these political games in order to score points.

The entire justice committee heard and put forward in the report the need for action expressed by Canadians. My constituents said that 16 and 17 year old repeat violent offenders should be treated as near adults rather than near children. I will repeat that. We are talking about repeat violent offenders being treated as near adults rather than near children.

Young children are being targeted for participation in criminal activities by older youth offenders and career criminal adults who believe they are untouchable and maybe will remain so under this redecorated bill. Unless 10 year olds are taken under wing by the justice system, especially a stronger system than we see today, they will be headed for future problems that all of society ends up paying for.

The member for Surrey North has logged countless hours with diversion programs that work. Every clear-thinking Canadian would like to see young people corrected before their misbehaviour leads to serious jail time.

The Liberal version of extra judicial measures has enough holes in it to drive a stolen car through. The definition of offenders who will be eligible for diversionary programs can include those very car thieves, drug traffickers and break and enter criminals as long as they do not “cause or create a substantial risk of causing bodily harm”. That is a loose term.

Like so many other statutes in law, this is open to interpretation. I can imagine courts taking up time defining what has happened before ever getting around to deciding what to do about it.

I wonder if teenagers out on a joy ride in a stolen car represent a substantial risk of causing bodily harm or an insubstantial one. I guess it depends on whether they run over anyone or not. Does whacking another fellow on the head with a lead pipe constitute more of a risk causing bodily harm than whacking him on the knee? I guess it all comes down to interpretation.

In section 9 we see that evidence of an offender having received extra judicial measures or special status on previous occasions is not admissible for proving prior offending behaviour. Like the closed file that we have now, the record of trouble with the law cannot be entered as evidence that the person is a repeat offender. The youth is safe again. This means that young offenders and drug traffickers could be diverted from serving jail time over and over again. They will not be called repeat offenders, never having been designated as repeat offenders, because each case will be or may be treated as a one time event. We can hope that this will not happen in practice but the opening is definitely there to be tested.

The definitions are all open to interpretation and challenge. As I said, our clogged court system will spend more time chasing its own tail and it will vary from province to province.

My constituents at the town hall meeting said that the central concept of the youth justice system must be that actions have consequences and that legal actions will bring swift and appropriate punishment. Instead, Bill C-68 brings more arguments between judges and lawyers. I guess that is a perverse Liberal job creation.

It is in the area of definitions and interpretations that gets us most in trouble. The justice minister has said that there are competing visions for competing cultures in law. She seemed to suggest there is a simplistic vision which wants to jail all transgressors and a more compassionate vision which wants to be flexible and helpful.

As every parent knows, there is room for both of these approaches when bringing up our young people. Parents know that sometimes we have to be firm and say no. When the line is drawn, the consequences for crossing it must be immediate and relevant, scaled up or down to fit the nature of the situation. My constituents were clear on this very distinction.

It is ironic that a government that keeps claiming a role in raising the next generation refuses to make the tough choices that parents must do every day. We do not see clear lines drawn in the bill so much as circles. We read about what may be done or what should be happening in a variety of cases and in different jurisdictions. This could be interpreted as flexibility, but in light of the present state of underfunded, overworked and handcuffed police forces in the country, I think we can see it as an abdication of a government bent on being politically correct and offending as few groups as possible while turning the whole mess over to the courts. That is simplistic; just pass the buck but not the money.

The old adage, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, certainly defines the direction we must entertain regarding our youth justice.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1998, May 10th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, ordinary members rise in the House to describe how proud or pleased they are to speak to a particular bill. However, today I can only say that I am disappointed with the thrust of Bill C-72. Actually, it is more of a short stab in the dark.

The parliamentary secretary talked in glowing terms of long term tax relief. The bottom line is long term. Will anybody live long enough to actually see tax relief?

My disappointment arises from what is not in this bill, as much as what is. We do not oppose certain measures such as the reinstatement of the $5,000 credit for investments in labour sponsored venture capital funds. That simply brings it back up to where it was before the government tinkered with it.

We understand the finance minister cut that amount in 1998 because certain funds were not doing what they were supposed to do. Fair enough. But in some regions of the country these funds are performing a valuable service.

We realize that we cannot simply open the floodgates on investments and accept accountability and viable opportunities for every dollar that is offered. That is why the Reform Party has long advocated increased competition in the financial services sector and a removal of foreign asset restrictions on RRSP accounts. This country needs a diverse pool of investment money and the widest possible range of opportunities for that investment.

The truth of the matter is there are clauses in this bill that can be commended in principle. The life learning plan allows Canadian residents to take money out of their RRSPs to pay for full time training for themselves or their spouses which is basically a good idea. I do not know if everyone in that situation can afford full time training—and that is the loophole, the catch—as opposed to something a little more flexible, but it is a noble effort.

We are aware that RRSP contributions have fallen off in the last two years. People just do not have the cash to buy those RRSPs. There is something like $126 billion in unused contribution room outstanding. As I said, it is a noble effort and let us hope there are a few Canadians out there who can actually afford to get retrained and plan on using that training here in Canada rather than being forced to go to other lower tax jurisdictions.

That same analysis applies to another program concerning part time education. Eligible part time students can use education tax credits and child care expense deductions to go back to school. I presume that helps young single mothers in particular. There is a lot of merit in doing that.

We can characterize this as a housekeeping bill. We are a few days late in getting the parliamentary rules in place. Revenue Canada's cutoff was about a week ago, but we still have not made into law the restrictions and so on that are actually in place for last year's Revenue Canada forms. It is a cart before the horse scenario.

Why not fill out the skeletal legislative agenda with bills that show vision, imagination and courage rather than something that is last year's business? I guess we would be treading on the Liberal's electoral secrets for success: say little, do less, keep your head down. This is a major disappointment for Canadians who are poised to grab their share of the future and find themselves regulated to death by their government.

What we do not see in Bill C-72 is any admission by the finance minister, his bureaucrats or any of the Liberal members of the finance committee that their tax system is out of control. We see a clause that reduces the individual surtax by a couple of bucks. Who on the government side would dare stand up and defend putting taxes on taxes in the first place? This goes on year after year and Canadians still wait for the government to wake up and straighten out the mess in the complex tax code it has made.

The 5% surcharge which remains untouched falls on incomes as low as $60,000, not a lot of money in today's economy. There are thousands of workers in high tech industries or specialized manufacturing who easily make that much, and what do they do? They take their skills and their incomes and they maximize them south of the border.

The Liberals maintain their punitive tax structures while Canadian artists, entrepreneurs, doctors and scientists head for friendlier climates. Worst of all, they table bills like this one to announce all over again what Canadians already heard about and paid for in last year's budget. They are so hungry for any positive PR spin that they keep talking about all the good things that really do not add up to any dollars at all.

We have heard the finance minister claim that the country can only afford this style of nickel and dime tax adjustment, that it costs the government to give people their own money back. What a ludicrous premise. We know what it costs because year after year the finance minister announces that his programs will cost the treasury so many billions of dollars, and he goes ahead and subtracts that amount from the nation's books or the taxpayers' pockets, whichever is handier.

There is another reason for my disappointment. This government bill takes the opportunity to fiddle with the tax act, but instead of simplifying it or even simplifying the language, it merely piles more complexity on to the impenetrable pile it started decades ago. Members have risen in this House and read out passages from this bill, or have referred to this and other bills as being as thick as phone books. I have said that if the tax code was piled up it would be taller than any individual. I can also say that the tax code when piled on the back of a taxpayer can drive him to his knees.

Does Bill C-72 address the complexity or incomprehensibility of the tax code? No it does not. It merely carries on the age-old tradition of defining the taxpayers' responsibility to the government and not the government's duty to lighten the burden of taxes and to reveal clearly why they are needed and how they will be spent. Accountability, quite a concept.

In the revised explanatory notes that accompanied this bill and which were published in March, there are several pages of anti-avoidance rules that chase taxpayers into their home offices to make sure they are rendering unto Caesar what Caesar decides is his.

Ironically, they also include exceptions which allow clever tax lawyers to again avoid the taxes that are being chased in the first place. We know from the auditor general's report that billions of dollars in potential taxes continue to elude governments. We are aware that despite promises there are still loopholes for the well to do to cart off family trusts to lower tax regimes around the world. So much for our complex tax codes.

The Liberals have made it clear that they believe the myth that high taxes result in high revenues and that excessive spending leads to better service. We would not have to dig too deep to expose how this logic breaks down in the real world. It is human nature to resist when being pushed where we do not want to go. When the price of a good or service rises, we look for a bargain or reduce our consumption of that article. If taxes become too much of a burden, we seek relief any way we can either by avoidance or by going where a more enlightened tax regime offers a better deal for our tax dollar.

Lower taxes are not the only thing that influences people but it starts a cycle of prosperity that solves many other issues. Increasingly higher taxes reduce economic activity until there is less and less to tax. Governments see decreasing returns and cannot afford the services they claim to uphold. We have seen those cuts to the bone in health care. This is the opposite of what some in the House will say. They are convinced that high taxes alone provide a foundation for services. They follow this logic to its faulty conclusion, a complex tax code, taxes on taxes.

On the other hand lower taxes do not lead to a lack of services for the following reasons. Given a limitless amount of money to spend, it is also human nature to continue to demand limitless services to go along with it. It is human nature for bureaucrats to continuously try to satisfy those demands. What we have seen in the last three decades or so is the explosion of government spending in an effort to micromanage every aspect of our economic and social lives.

Government is everywhere trying to be all things to all people and failing at most. It tries to be charitable but ends up subsidizing self-defeating behaviour. It tries to stimulate a business on one side of the street while putting another one out of business through higher taxation and artificial competition.

The government creates monopolies and then finds itself in an endless process of paying inflated sums to keep the market under control. The old adage is if it moves tax it. If it moves again tax it some more. If it stops moving the government subsidizes it so it can tax it when it starts to move again. That seems to fit in very well with this logic.

In the 1999 budget we saw an increase in the child tax benefit and an admission by the finance minister that the clawback provisions are a disincentive for parents to earn more money. According to the C.D. Howe Institute, even with the tinkering, single earner families with two children with earnings in the $20,000 to $30,000 range, which is right around that poverty line that has been arbitrarily set, would keep less than $35 from an additional $100 earnings. This is true of the worst provinces. I define those as the ones where there are so many overlapping federal and provincial programs that Canadians have no choice but to sit and wait for the government to tell them what their income is going to be.

In Bill C-72 we see the same tinkering at work. The child care expense deduction has been increased to $7,000 but it only applies to parents who hire people to take care of their kids. This has become a fairly common situation in Canadian households. Many people are of the opinion that one of the strongest reasons for this is that the government takes too much money.

Canadian couples should have the decision as to how they are going to raise their children. It has been snatched from their hands and placed in the cold dead grip of a disinterested bureaucracy with its own social agenda.

Taxpayers' money not only goes to finance programs to relieve a situation that governments create, but it also goes to finance lobby groups to perpetuate the myth that Canadian families would be in stress without the government rather than because of it. Even so, tens of thousands of brave parents make the courageous decision to re-order their lifestyle to fit what is best for their young children.

Bill C-72 fails to address another situation that is obvious to everyone except the Prime Minister. On May 3 the Prime Minister got up and said the government wiped out bracket creep by increasing the personal exemption by a whopping $50 a month. He failed to mention several facts of which the government should rightly be embarrassed.

Not only should the basic personal exemption be in excess of $8,000 a year, but the Liberals are only going to phase in their tinkering over the next two years. It will only go to a maximum of $7,131, not nearly enough in today's economy.

They like to brag on the other side that somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 Canadians have been pushed off the tax rolls with their generosity. They fail to mention that 1.4 million people have been added back on through the back door to these tax rolls because the Liberals have not got around to adjusting the tax brackets for inflation. We call that bracket creep. That is according to the OECD study.

A KPMG study, and we know how much the finance minister likes those when they are in his favour, has shown that the low to middle tax bracket of $29,590 should be almost $37,000, an increase of over $8,000. If anybody in the finance department had bothered to keep up with the times, the higher tax bracket of $59,180 should be over $73,000 just to keep up with inflation. That might convince many of our valuable scientists, engineers and skilled workers to stay here and add that value to our country and our economy.

The Liberals would tell us that they cannot afford real tax cuts, only the nickel and dime stuff they have been feeding Canadians. In Bill C-72 there is another instalment of surtax reduction, although we always hear that it is $500 a year when in fact it was $250 last year and $250 this year. Again, the numbers are better when we add them altogether. I wonder if many Canadians will actually notice that change in April 2000.

There is a tax credit for interest paid on student loans which is a good thing, but it only applies to the federal government student loans, not to the bank student loans. There is a real disparity. The students who are still going to school can write off the federal government part but not the bank loans. As the federal government withdraws from programs such as that, these same students find themselves caught on the horns of a dilemma.

I wonder how much better off we would all be if the finance minister had not wasted time with the millennium scholarship fund and simply had gone to the source. That was really the taxpayers' hard earned surplus in 1998. If he had turned the money back to students who really need it, I think we would have got a lot more bang for our buck.

Eliminating bracket creep for instance would have put a $900 million ding into the finance minister's slush fund but would have put hundreds of dollars back into the hands of low and middle income Canadians, right where they need it.

We also see provisions for people to use their RRSPs for something other than a hedge against government incompetence in mismanagement of the CPP fund. People can withdraw money for education, which is good. But since it is their money anyway, it is a bit of a shell game as to what they should be able to do with it.

I come back to the question of why the government cannot do anything more substantial or imaginative than this tinkering we see in Bill C-72. This government will try to use two excuses. It will say that it will not cut taxes and it will not tax us back into a deficit the same way it taxed us into the high spending it did in the first place. It will also say that it wants to be fair to the poor or maintain services that Canadians are so proud of, part of our Canadian mosaic, or that it apparently represents what we are as a people.

We have seen government spending go up the last three years and projections that it will continue to do so. This is hardly a prudent way to manage the future. Our fundamentals are supposedly right, but in our minds they are not.

We have also seen the insatiable desire of this government to hold control of every aspect of health care and social spending in its grip, even in the face of the Liberals' proven incompetence.

As I said before, we have the cart before the horse with this legislation. We are working with provisions in this bill that were actually implemented last year. The funding was set aside last year.

The parliamentary secretary in his address earlier this morning talked in glowing terms about people below $20,000 being in a tax free zone. I ask what is the big deal? That is still well below the poverty line that is arbitrarily set in Canada, so that is really not a whole lot to crow about.

People in Canada are looking for real tax relief. The industry minister, with supporting statistics from his own department, Industry Canada, has acknowledged the realities of a high tax system in Canada and what it is doing to our economy here, our productivity, as it were.

Again the parliamentary secretary talked about the RESPs. As I said before, if we are talking to finance people, a trust fund is far more manageable in the RRSP portion of it. It gives us lots more flexibility. Students can do different things with that. They do not have to go to the same type of college or facility that the RESPs would direct them to. It is much more easy and much more flexible to put that money into a trust fund.

The caregiver tax credit of $400 that he so eloquently spoke of appears at $11,000 worth of income. It is nickels and dimes again. It does not go anywhere. As a caregiver, $400 a year does not begin to cover a week's cost when one is caring for an invalid or a handicapped person. It is an insult to these people.

The parliamentary secretary talked in glowing terms and his words were that the winds of tax relief were blowing across the country. I would say that the reality is it is not even a gentle breeze.

[Taxation, May 7th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the reality is those jobs were created in Ontario and Alberta, two provinces which have recognized that a lower tax rate increases jobs. It has proved itself.

It seems that whenever the government identifies a problem it gets worse. It collects extra taxes for a child poverty strategy, and more kids and their parents are living in poverty. It creates a youth employment strategy, and unemployment youth numbers increase.

Does the government not realize if it takes less in taxes ordinary Canadians will do a better job looking after themselves?

[Taxation, May 7th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, even after all the flowery rhetoric the reality is that when taxes are up unemployment rises, when taxes are up health care waiting lists get longer, and when taxes are up secondary education is an unattainable dream for most people today.

These are the realities. Is this what the government is bragging about: pay more, get less?

[Pensions, April 23rd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, first the government pirated the worker's EI fund for $26 billion and now it has its sights set on the $30 billion public pension fund surplus.

Is no fund safe from the government? Does it not realize the dangerous precedent it is setting with these moves?

[Budget Implementation Act, 1999, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly budget day here on the Hill.

Less than an hour ago we were discussing last year's budget and the dollars that have been pre-booked into this year. It is kind of like closing the chicken coop after the fox has already been there. We have less than two weeks in this fiscal year as far as Revenue Canada is concerned to implement the additions and complications that were added to Revenue Canada from last year's budget. People are already filling out their tax forms under those rules and regulations and we have not even passed them in this House yet. It kind of makes us wonder why we are here.

As to this year's budget, it is Bill C-71, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled on February 16, 1999. However, thanks to the way this finance minister has taken to spinning these books, we actually end up talking about money spent last year, this year and into the future, and other money Canadians will not see for two, three or five years.

It is too bad that while the Liberals are bragging about how well they listen to Canadians in their across Canada tours, the public does not seem terribly interested in keeping tabs on where their tax dollars go. They know they go to Ottawa and then they just disappear.

This system of prebudget and post-legislating has become so convoluted and complex that average Canadians do not have a hope of unravelling it before the next election. Unfortunately it may take a slowdown in the global economy to accomplish this unravelling and really bring out the problems, but by then we will all be struggling to survive the past six years of so-called Liberal prudence.

I will refer to some specifics of this myth of prudence. We all know that in theory the finance minister is only projecting two years into the future with each budget. The problem is that some of his spending is still tripping out of the treasury five years from now, the so-called health care budget.

We have seen the millennium scholarship fund from last year get deducted from the 1998 budget as a $2.5 billion forwarded expense. No one else in Canada can have that option. We are not allowed to forward budget like that. It may have helped to alleviate some of the problems on Canadian farms if they were allowed to do that. It is not $2.5 billion in reality. It is a series of charges handed out from the year 2000 and on that will only go to a handful of Canadians, in the face of opposition from Quebec and other provinces and most of the student groups we listened to.

It is not wanted out there and it is not needed since there are hundreds of scholarships and bursaries already out there from the private sector and other places. Why not top these up at a charge of $350 million per year only in the year the expense occurs? Why do we have to forward it into more and more years and book that $2.5 billion out of the so-called surplus? I guess no one else can get their fingers on it that way.

It is not prudent to give away taxpayers' money against their wishes in a way that brings disrepute on the nation's finances. So much for listening to Canadians. Do not for once think that financial experts from around the world are not looking over the shoulder of this government. We see that in our stock market rises and falls.

There have been compliments for Canada's sacrifices to get back on a balanced budget. That strong economy and those sacrifices belong to the Canadian taxpayer, not to this Liberal government. It may take the credit but it did not do the job. The minister has rightfully thanked the taxpayer for doing some of that but not all.

There is obviously a deep-seated nervousness about where the Liberals will go with this large gift of money that has been handed to them. The dollar reflects this. It is positively anemic. International organizations continue to warn us that our productivity, that great buzzword we are hearing kicked about, and our technological expertise are slipping badly.

Canadians who require years of training at public expense head for greener pastures because the government is too busy having a wild spending spree and thinking ahead as to what it can spend that found money on. The government is too busy to notice that the money it is throwing out the window has to be generated by its taxpaying citizens and businesses in the first place. So much for listening to Canadians.

I would like to remind the House what Dr. Prudence prescribed for this country in 1997. The projection for 1998-99 was for revenues of $144 billion. The next year it was revised upward to $151 billion, found cash. Now we are led to believe that in fact it may exceed $156 billion; just missed the target by $12 billion, luckily to the plus side.

Those extra dollars were generated by Canadians. Where do they end up? Back in the hands of the original owners? No, not a chance. The Liberal government finds ways to spend it faster and faster. When the government discovered that its so-called prudent projections were out of whack, it does not announce a more prudent retirement of the debt and it does not announce a more prudent reduction in how much of taxpayers' money it will skim off. Instead the government announces it will prudently spend everything it has and more.

In an article in the February 24 Financial Post William Watson directs our attention to table 3.4 on page 57 of the budget documents. This trained and respected economist says that before 1998 drew to a close, the government had $11.7 billion of extra taxpayers' money it had not spent yet. Great idea. What are we going to do with it now? Typically it lists a series of items that magically added up to $11.7 billion and declared a balance. Great accounting. Mr. Watson called it disgusting and I am inclined to agree with him.

The lesson we learned from this is simple. Given money, the Liberals will spend it for us. It would never occur to them to let Canadians keep it in the first place. The Liberals have another trick that they hope nobody will ever catch on to. They have a habit of making virtue out of vice and spinning themselves as the heroes of fiscal prudence.

Originally the government cut $21 billion out of social transfers over the last five years. Now the government is talking about putting $11.5 billion back into health care. Billions. Big numbers. Let us break that down. As my esteemed colleague from Elk Island pointed out, if we divide that amount by the five years it covers, we end up with a lot lower number, $2.5 billion. That hardly makes a dent. It is the same cost as the millennium scholarship fund going back to a health care system that is in crisis across the country.

I had a discussion with Dr. Hal Baldwin from Saskatoon a short time ago. He is the treasurer of the Canadian Medical Association. He said that it is not just money that was ripped out of health care across this country, the heart and soul was taken out as well. We have not just taken the money out, we have taken the care out of health care.

These people are working handcuffed. The nurses association is on strike right now in Saskatchewan. It is not just money they are talking about. Their hands are tied when it comes to caring for people, really caring, and putting that back into health care.

We have a $900 million farm aid package that is supposed to impact my province of Saskatchewan. It has had years and years of drought situations and people with no net income for three and four years. Do these people qualify for any of this aid? Not on your life. There is no part in the equation for a zero, zero, zero balance. That is unfortunate.

The minister of agriculture was asked the other day by my colleague from Selkirk—Interlake how many applications the department had received and how much money had actually gone out of this $900 million. The minister talked about 11,000 applications being mailed into Saskatchewan. Well that is notable but there are almost 60,000 farmers in Saskatchewan. We have less than one-fifth who have actually applied because they know they do not qualify. They have a little off farm income and some custom work. They have some livestock.

This program really goes nowhere. It is a great PR exercise but it is just like the whole budget. It is all puff and mirrors. There is no substance here at all.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1998, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague spoke about complexity and our convoluted tax code. We started out with a tax code in a little book about a half an inch thick. Now we are up to volumes that stand taller than I do. We never seem to get rid of some of the old stuff that has not worked. We have dehumanized the system. The fairness is missing, as he has alluded to.

Could he give me some comments on the unfairness to tradespeople: mechanics, auto body technicians, tradespeople in other walks of life, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and so on? They are unable to write off the cost of the tools and equipment they bring to their jobs. In a lot of cases it is a $15,000 to $20,000 investment of after tax dollars. It is a prerequisite of their employment that they have to come up with that kind of cash in after tax dollars. It is just an unfair burden on a lot of tradespeople, some of whom are young.

It seems to fly in the face of the youth training program initiative the government loves to talk about. That fairness initiative is not being implemented in the tax system. Would he care to comment on that, please?

[Petitions, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today on behalf of my constituents who have put together two petitions on the sanctity of marriage.

The petitioners are asking that parliament enact private member's Bill C-225, an act to amend the Marriage Act and the Interpretation Act so as to define in statute that a marriage can only be entered into between a single male and a single female.

This government talks the talk but has not walked the walk and these petitioners are asking it to do that.

[Coastal Fisheries Protection Act, April 13th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, since I abstained on the last vote too, I would like my vote recorded as being opposed to this one.

(The House divided on Motion No. 1, which was negatived on the following division:)