Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support Bill C-27. However, the bill shows that the Liberal Party still has nothing new to offer Canadians even after six months behind the wheel of this Chevy government. In fact many of the provisions date back to finance minister Mazankowski and the Mulroney era.
During the election Canadians were promised change, new directions, ideas and initiatives. What they are receiving are rehashed housekeeping bills that have been kicked around since the Tory days, lumped together and packaged as new and improved.
It is bills like this that show members of the Reform Party that the Liberals may have the people but they most certainly do not have the plan.
The sheer size and complexity of this bill is symbolic of what is wrong with our entire taxation system. The title reads an act to amend the Income Tax Act, the Income Tax Application Rules, the Canada Pension Plan, the Canada Business Corporations Act, the Excise Tax Act, the Unemployment Insurance Act and certain related acts.
The explanatory notes alone almost outnumber the amendments. Bill C-27 covers everything from the tax treatment of automobile operating costs to minerals in the mining industry. It is one inch thick. Once passed it will add more rules, regulations, subsections and pages to the overall complex, confusing and convoluting Income Tax Act.
Let me read something from the Income Tax Act and see if we can understand it after we are finished. Section 23(1) paragraph (c) of the definition "superficial loss".
This is what we have to know by the time we are done:
-in section 54 of the Act is replaced by the following:
(c) was the disposition deemed by paragraph 33.1(11)(a), subsection 45(1), Section 48 as it read in its application before 1993, section 50 or 70, subsection 104(4), section 128.1 or subsection 138(11.3), 144(4.1) or (4.2) or 149(10) to have been made,-
- (1) Section 55 of the Act is amended by adding the following after subsection (3):
(3.1) Notwithstanding subsection (3), a dividend to which subsection (2) would, but for paragraph (3)(b), otherwise apply is not excluded from the application of subsection (2) where the dividend is received as part of a series of transactions or events in which
(a) a person or partnership
I might as well stop. Do we know what a superficial loss is?