Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to this bill. As everyone knows, the Liberals will be voting against the bill for many reasons.
I would like to begin by raising a point that I have not yet heard discussed during this debate: the fact that this government is creating a culture of fear.
By that I mean that the government is proposing to fire some 20,000 public servants but some 100,000 public servants have received notice that they might be fired. The effect of that is to create a culture of fear in 100,000 Canadian families. This is a mean-spirited and heartless way to carry out reductions in employment. It causes fear in so many more people than actually will be affected. When we were in government, we were not strangers to expenditure review, but at no point did we arrange the loss of employment in such an unnecessarily cruel way. More often than not, we did it by attrition. Sometimes that was not possible, but we never sent notices to five times the number of people who could lose their jobs to the effect that they might lose their job. That is a particularly reprehensible part of this legislation.
There is a second thing I do not like about this legislation. Canada depends on innovation for productivity growth. Canada's record on private sector expenditure on R and D has been weak compared with that of most other western countries. That is one of the reasons that our productivity growth has been low for decades and why the growth and living standards of the Canadian middle-class has been suffering.
One would have thought that a sensible government might inject measures to promote innovation and research and development expenditures, but the Conservative government has done just the opposite. It reduced by a very significant amount the SR&ED tax credit. The SR&ED tax credit is an extremely valuable tool to encourage research and development, and innovation and productivity growth but, for some inexplicable reason, this has been cut.
There was a proposal, which I do not think is in the budget, to give less in tax credits but more in direct grants to companies. That is a very weird idea coming from a Conservative government because that implies that the government has the wherewithal, the knowledge and the brains to distinguish between winning companies and losing companies. If one were a Conservative, would it not make more sense to use the tax credit, which is neutral and does not imply that government knows best, and let the market and the entrepreneurs decide which companies are winners and which are losers?
This approach taken by the Conservatives is reminiscent of what one might expect from an NDP government, which might well think that government knows best, but instead we have this rather paternalistic approach to how we should run this economy coming from the Conservative side of the House. Maybe that means we need to get back to the Liberals.
There are many other weaknesses in the bill. It would dramatically weaken the laws on waterways and other things. However, I will spend a little time on why I think it is a badly constructed bill. Whether we agree with all the content is one thing, but it is constructed in a sloppy way, which probably reflects the fact that when a government tries to have so many pages of legislation in so little time it is likely to make mistakes.
I will describe three of the mistakes that lead me to think that this is not only a bad bill but also a sloppy bill that will probably need further corrections down the road.
The first point, which I mentioned earlier in a question, is the hiring credit where the government slips in a 7¢ EI premium hike where, in the case of companies that are near their limit, they will be penalized by either hiring more people or paying higher wages. This is a complete slip-up unless the government deliberately set out to hurt small businesses. This is something the government should not have wanted to do. It is an unintended negative consequence of this bill, which is why we brought in an amendment at committee to fix it. However, the government declined to support our amendment.
That is the first mistake the government made. And that is the first reason this bill is poorly constructed, I think.
The second bad thing about the construction of the bill refers to the negative impact on Canada's mining industry. I do not always agree with the Conservatives but I do not think they deliberately set out to destroy Canada's mining industry, so I would say that this is another unintended consequence, because one of the items in the bill would have a potentially serious negative effect on the mining industry.
To make this point, I want to quote from a letter from the Toronto Stock Exchange and the TSX Venture Exchange dated November 14, 2012, which explains clearly the grounds for this concern. The section of the bill concerns tax avoidance and specifically something called foreign affiliate dumping. This is not a quote from the NDP. It is a quote from the Toronto Stock Exchange on why it claims the bill is flawed. The letter reads:
We believe that the Proposed Rules, in their current form, cast too wide a net and risk impacting or diminishing legitimate and entirely appropriate activity by hundreds of publicly listed companies on our markets. Should the rules be introduced without further appropriate amendment, Canada's world-leading position and reputation as a market for resource issuers may be negatively impacted by creating inefficiencies in accessing capital and harming corporate valuations.
Based on our preliminary research, we estimate that in excess of 700 publicly-traded Canadian corporations with operations in a foreign jurisdiction could potentially be inadvertently and inappropriately impacted by the Proposed Rules....
We are extremely concerned that decades of effort to give Canada global leadership in a critical sector of capital markets activity can be impacted by the unadjusted implementation of the Proposed Rules.
That is very clear language. This bill would unintentionally harm some 700 publicly traded Canadian corporations in a sector of the economy, the mining sector, which has been in the past critical to Canada's prosperity and will continue to be critical to our prosperity going forward.
I will read one other quote on this same subject, a letter from the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, dated October 13, 2012. It reads:
Given the substantial quantum of money required to bring a mining project into production, the proposed provisions will result in an unacceptable level of additional tax risk being added to the undertaking of the development of the project, making it less attractive for foreign investors to invest in such CRICs and consequently adoption of the foreign affiliate dumping proposals as currently drafted will make it extremely difficult for Canadian juniors to finance large projects.
The Conservatives had these letters. They had their own financial analysts. Are they too proud, is there too much hubris to admit that in all those hundreds of pages they might have made one or two slip-ups? There was ample time to fix it. We brought it to their attention but they chose not to fix it. They went blindly ahead with a project that was fundamentally flawed and will wreak serious damage onto one of Canada's key industries.
I can count at least three ways in which the bill is badly constructed.
First of all, this bill is poorly constructed because of the credit I just explained a few moments ago. Second, it is poorly constructed because it is bad for the mining sector, as I just explained. Third, given that the Conservatives made many mistakes in the last bill and those mistakes had to be corrected in this one, I have no doubt that we will continue to find mistakes in the next few months or the next year, and once again, Parliament will be forced to make changes to it.
Let me conclude by saying that I reject this culture of fear when possible dismissal letters are sent to a hundred thousand families and only 20,000 people need to be laid off. This is totally unnecessary and mean-spirited, especially as we approach Christmas. It is also entirely inappropriate for a country like Canada, which has suffered from low innovation in research and productivity, to slash the SR and ED tax credits.
Finally, I would contend that technically this is a badly constructed bill. It could have been amended in simple ways to fix these fundamental deficiencies. However, the Conservatives, perhaps through hubris, perhaps through wanting to amend nothing whatsoever, refused to even consider such amendments. As a consequence, we have flaws in the hiring credit legislation, which will damage some small businesses in the country. We have flaws in the foreign affiliate dumping legislation, which will do serious harm to Canada's mining industry.
Also, given the flawed and sloppy nature of the drafting of the bill, and given that errors were contained in the previous budget implementation bill that had to be corrected this time around, we can be sure that six months from now or one year from now we will see a new bill fixing the errors, perhaps the ones I have mentioned, perhaps many more, that will undoubtedly be contained in Bill C-45.
