Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to participate in the debate today on taking care of small business.
A few years ago the previous government loaded on small business one of the biggest paper burdens we have seen in many a long year, which was the introduction of the goods and services tax. It turned every small business person into a tax collector.
The government said it was going to get rid of the GST and now a year later we are still waiting. Last February the Minister of Finance introduced his budget and took away the capital gains exemption. I wonder what that is doing for small business. He
reduced the small business tax exemption, which caused good and prosperous small businesses to pay more taxes. I wonder if that is what they mean by taking care of business.
The first responsibility of government to small business and the millions it employs is to create an economic climate that is conducive to economic growth and expansion. This growth and expansion will lead to prosperity for the risk takers, jobs for the employees, create new opportunities for the unemployed, provide economic stability for Canadians and their families, and create new and novel businesses and economic opportunities.
We have to get the government off the people's backs. We have to give incentive and opportunity for small businesses to see opportunities, take advantage of these opportunities where they can go forward, put their money where their mouths are, take the risk, take the gamble, go forward and win without the federal government either taxing them to death or providing tax free money to the competition and shooting them down at every opportunity.
What are the ingredients for this economic climate? Surely it is a federal government that both preaches and practises fiscal responsibility. We expect small business to practise and preach fiscal responsibility, look after its credit and be able to repay its loans, otherwise we are not going to give them money.
The federal government talks about fiscal responsibility but has yet to deliver on anything regarding fiscal responsibility. It had a very weak and timid objective to reduce the deficit to $25 billion per annum. By the Minister of Finance's own admission he is going to miss that target, yet he has done nothing to bring the government back into line with its own estimates and targets. Government spending must be significantly reduced to restore order to our fiscal house and to provide some confidence to small business.
Once government spending is brought under control and the budget is balanced, the benefits for Canadians, including small business people, will be a stable fiscal environment in which they can plan for the future, grow, develop, create employment and reduce the unemployment costs to the country. We could also then look forward to a reduction in the exorbitant levels of taxation that funds the voracious and excessive appetite of government spending.
When the Auditor General tabled his report earlier this year, he said that hard choices lie ahead.
The federal portion of the national debt today is $538,000,181,919.99 according to the number I have. The debt, as I mentioned before, per taxpayer which includes every small business person who is also a taxpayer, is $38,287. The federal debt per capita is $18,920. As small business people go around the world trying to compete, to sell their product, they have to build into the price of that product the cost of the high taxes that pay for the interest on the debt.
The Auditor General stated in his 1993 report that hard choices have to be made to deal with the problem of the debt. The hard choice is between the continued growth of the debt or stop digging a bigger debt hole, as we said during the last election. The hard choice is between continued excessive overspending or practising fiscal responsibility and prudence. The hard choice is between continued high levels of taxation, with the possibility of even higher taxes and new taxes to fund the debt or hopefully the prospect of tax relief by restoring order to the federal government's fiscal house.
If we do not make these hard choices and go with what we have been doing before, we can guarantee that taxes will continue to go up. We can guarantee that our interest rates will remain high as we try and bring in more and more money every month to just pay the groceries, so to speak, of the federal government. The dollar will have to be maintained up so that foreign lenders to us will continue to lend money to Canada.
Therefore, we expect small business and business in general to compete around the world as it worries about high taxes because of the national debt, high interest rates because of the current fiscal situation, a high dollar on the international money markets because of our situation. We still expect them to compete.
Is that what we call taking care of business? I hope not. I hope that the federal government would see its way to changing the policies and dramatically reducing the spending. In that way we can expect small businesses to play their part, create the jobs, create the environment where there are more people paying taxes and collecting taxes and bring our whole fiscal situation under control.
Unfortunately we have had nothing but paper from the government. A year ago it introduced a red book which stated that the GST would go. The finance committee sat for months and months and produced a report that is now on the shelf. The government cannot move from the report to action. We are still waiting for any kind of action on a report that was tabled months ago and promised a year ago. There has been no action.
The Minister of Human Resources Development tabled a paper several weeks ago. He now says we have a problem but that he does not have any plan whatsoever to try and fix it.
The Minister of Finance tabled a couple of papers recently in which he stated: "We have a problem in this country but I don't have any idea how we were going to fix it. Let's go out there and see if somebody else has an idea". Now we have a report titled "Taking Care of Small Business" from the Standing Committee on Industry. I sincerely hope that this is not another one that is just going to go on the shelf and that is the end of it.
The time has come to act. Let us take a look at some of the statistics. In 1990, 97.2 per cent of all registered businesses in Canada had fewer than 50 employees; 52 per cent of Canadians employed in the private sector are employed by businesses with fewer than 100 employees; and 45 per cent of Canadians are employed in businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Therefore, there is no question whatsoever that small business is the engine that drives the Canadian economy. It has to be protected, encouraged, enhanced. It has to be competitive. They are the ones we depend upon to generate the taxes that we spend on our social programs.
I urge the government to stop the endless production of paper and let us see some action. Let us see it create a climate that fosters economic growth and prosperity rather than just picking a few winners and handing them all kinds of cash. Let us see a climate of reduced government spending, a balanced budget and tax relief. These are concrete suggestions. Good government solutions must be found and implemented to address the long term concerns and issues facing the small business community rather than giving them short term, quick fix and politically expedient measures.