Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for the accuracy in your time assessment. I had calculated 23 minutes and 49 seconds myself, but I accept your time of 24 minutes.
So we were considering at third reading Bill S-2, which renews a tax agreement between Canada and five other countries, namely Hungary, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Argentina and the Netherlands. It is never very enjoyable to be interrupted in the middle of a speech, so I will repeat some of the points I covered in detail in the first part of my speech.
The first point is that the Bloc Quebecois has nothing against the countries that have signed the tax agreements mentioned in Bill S-2. The Bloc Quebecois, like all Quebec sovereignists, has shown in the past that it is open to the world, has a deep-rooted tradition in the international cooperation and development area and supports mainly North American but also international agreements of all kinds.
You will recall how we supported the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Mexico, as well as the GATT agreements signed last December. After long and laborious negotiations, we came to support these conventions, these international agreements.
The same thing applies to tax conventions. When they meet the original needs and the criteria that have been set, we have nothing against such conventions. First and foremost, these tax conventions are used to avoid taxing twice a company which has foreign affiliates.
These are indeed very worthy conventions, but for them to meet their main goal, there has to be reciprocity between Canada and the countries with which we have signed these conventions. There must be reciprocity as well as commensurate tax treatment for profits made by the companies, capital profits and a similar series of exemptions for private corporations.
But, these last few years, the Auditor General of Canada as well as some Liberal members, then in opposition, denounced in no uncertain terms some of these conventions which were signed and are still being renewed between Canada and countries considered as tax havens for hundreds of millions of federal government tax dollars.
I was pointing to the flaws of the tax convention system and explaining why we have so many reservations about a measure like Bill S-2, as we have long been asking for a review of each of these arrangements between Canada and various countries to discover which countries do not deserve reciprocity agreements or tax treaties such as the one under review this afternoon.
We were not the only ones who denounced these conventions. Several others have already done so. For example, in December 1992, the sitting hon. member for Ottawa-Vanier, himself a Liberal, criticized loopholes in tax conventions with countries considered as tax havens, by declaring the following: "We are really worried because the Department of Finance has done nothing to eliminate most of these schemes"-he was talking about schemes concerning tax conventions with countries considered as being tax havens-"used by foreign subsidiaries to avoid taxation. In my opinion, this problem is not new and we are confronting it again this year".
Indeed, the problem is not new. I would say that, since 1987 or approximately 1987, the Department of Finance has been "dealing with" the problems of tax loopholes associated with tax treaties. Indeed, in 1987, the Department of Finance announced that it would study the taxing of foreign affiliates. These studies were never tabled. Imagine! The Department of Finance of Canada has been aware of the problems for seven years, and has let them deteriorate for seven years. It has let these problems deteriorate while the Conservatives were in office, and it is letting them deteriorate under the Liberals.
I am extremely disappointed that the Minister of Finance and the Liberal government did not respond to our numerous calls for a serious and comprehensive analysis of those tax conventions that are causing the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars to the federal treasury in a period where, for some time already, we can no longer afford to deliberately lose hundreds of millions of dollars. This government continues to be inactive in the examination of those tax conventions. Even worse, it is proposing us to extend those conventions before analyzing their provisions as a whole.
This government perpetuates the injustices detected in some tax conventions, the sieves for Canadian corporations that do not carry out their duty as good corporate citizens in terms of contributing to the elimination of the deficit and debt problem of the federal government. I would tell you that the Liberal government, the Liberals, the members of the Liberal Party of Canada are only sensitive to two words: "lobby" and "friends".
As was the case for all taxation decisions that have been made since the evening of October 25, since the last election, and in particular since February 22 or 23, when the Liberal government tabled its first budget, these two words have become commonplace within the Liberal Party.
All taxation decisions have been made on this basis, on the basis of lobbyists and friends of the party. Perhaps I should have mentioned a third word: lobbyists, friends of the party. Friends who have been handsomely paid for their support since the Liberal Party came to power.
Friends who, for several years, have made generous contributions to the Liberal Party of Canada. Friends who are also stakeholders in tax loopholes such as those provided for in income tax treaties, family trusts and different leaks in the Canadian tax system.
With regard to the funding of political parties, is it normal that big Canadian corporations contribute such huge amounts to the Liberal Party of Canada in the same way they contributed and may still be contributing huge amounts to the Conservative Party of Canada, as they did last year?
Is it democratic, in a country that prides itself on being democratic, for a government to have both hands tied and not to be able to run the country freely because those people, from the Liberal Party of Canada, have to please those who contributed generously to the fund of their party? They have to be careful not to disappoint them. The Liberal Party has to go on. Like any other great federalist party, the Liberal Party must have some continuity. So, when these people come to power, the first thing they have to do is to please the friends of their party.
When someone wants to change a tax convention, for example, and when a Canadian business that made donations to the fund of the Liberal Party of Canada for many years comes under fire for its ability to evade taxation in Canada, it is quite usual, for this government, not to take its responsibilities and bring about sound reforms.
When we learn that the National Trust Company contributed $12,454.70 to the Liberal Party in 1993 and the Royal Bank of Canada gave $45,000 to the same party, we are not surprised to see that this government refuses to put in place measures that could affect it, nor can we fail to notice a certain complicity between a federalist message and the annual report of the Royal Bank or any other analysis of the constitutional impact of a certain decision that the Quebec population could make.
Is it normal too for the Liberal Party to receive $25,000 from the Royal Trust Company, $42,000 from the Bank of Nova Scotia, $40,000 from the Toronto Dominion Bank and $31,253 from Scotia McLeod and so forth? I could go on, there are many other examples.
In any case, the Liberal Party of Canada gets half of its funds from big business. So, not surprisingly, when the time comes to make decisions in the public interest, decisions which could further restore the public finances, at least in part, and which could somewhat tighten the budgetary policy or close tax loopholes, these measures, the real initiatives that should be taken, are not.
The Liberal Party, a great Canadian party, like the Conservative Party, came to office with its hands tied; they feel uneasy because they have to deal with lobbies and friends of the party.
By the way, we saw over the week-end that if you are not part of a lobby, if you are not a friend of the party, you are at a disadvantage. A newspaper article this week-end said that rich families lobbied the government to keep their tax exemption. The Canadian Press article mentioned family trusts and said: "A lobby representing some of Canada's oldest and wealthiest family businesses talked the former Conservative government out of imposing capital gains tax on sheltered trust funds worth billions".
They managed to do the same with the Liberal government, the present Liberal administration. They succeeded to do the same, because despite pressures from the Bloc Quebecois, from the Reform Party and from people fed up with social injustices, tired of paying for fiscal mismanagement and weary of lack of control on public finances, despite all these pressures, the first budget of the Liberal Party did not abolish the privileges of family trusts and did not plug the loopholes created by tax treaties signed between Canada and countries considered as tax havens.
I will continue with the article, because I found it fascinating and very representative of everything we have denounced about this government, about patronage and party friends. You know that family trusts were instituted by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I can call him by his name since he is no longer a member of Parliament. It was Trudeau's idea. Trudeau is our phantom of the opera; he haunts this place. Every time you happen upon a bad measure, as it turns out, Trudeau was behind it. And if it is not Trudeau, it is the current Prime Minister of Canada.
Interviewed in Toronto, Mr. Sharwood, the former president of Guaranty Trust, one of the contributors to the Liberal Party fund, indicated that the majority of the members of his association-read lobby or interest group-are family businesses that go back several generations. The association also represents families among the wealthiest. This means that all the wealthiest families are bunched together in the same lobby. These families, the wealthiest in Canada, have contributed to the Liberal Party of Canada election fund. So you can imagine what kind of a welcome is extended to anyone from this lobby when
he or she knocks on the door of the finance minister or of the Prime Minister.
I am not surprised to see how powerful these lobbies are, considering they spend millions, even hundreds of millions-if you put together all the contributions made by large corporations formed into a lobby-on furthering their own interests, not those of the people of Quebec or Canada. I am not surprised to see that they manage, as they often do, to prevent this government from making perfectly legitimate decisions that would certainly be welcome, given all the sacrifices asked of taxpayers in Quebec and Canada, people who are already crushed by the tax system.
I am not surprised when I look at the arrangements, at the family trust issue. I am not surprised, but I was even less surprised when I participated in the debate on the bill tabled by the Minister of Transport concerning Pearson airport. During that debate, which was very similar to this one on tax agreements and family trusts, we discovered that friends of the party had once again shown great strength, forming lobbies to ensure that the Minister of Transport, in his legislation regarding Pearson airport, would retain some discretionary power to, perhaps, compensate them if he deemed appropriate to do so following the cancellation of the contract for the privatization of that airport.
There, as in the case of the two previous issues, and particularly this one on tax agreements, we noticed that friends such as Leo Kolber-he is the senator who organized a small lunch at $1,000 a plate during the elections to finance the Liberal Party of Canada's campaign-played an active role in the privatization of Pearson airport. Leo Kolber had invited friends such as Charles Bronfman. Herb Metcalfe, a lobbyist with the Capital group, was also present, as well as Ramsay Withers, a federal lobbyist with close ties to the current Prime Minister.
So, there were many friends of the party who, again, formed a lobby to ask that at least some clauses in the bill tabled by the Minister of Transport provide benefits to them. These are friends of the party who formed lobbies. Imagine their power: they exert direct pressure on the Liberal Party to make sure it implements measures which will benefit their own interests.
When I see all this and when I look at what the government's last budget, which was its first one, contains in the way of budget cuts at the expense of the average citizen, I am disgusted, because I have yet to hear a single Liberal, among all those who have been complaining bitterly about such cuts for the past eight years, object to the fact that the government is doing nothing about unfair practices and loopholes in the Canadian tax system, while on the other hand, in order to improve the state of the federal treasury, it introduces measures like cutting $5.5 billion from the unemployment insurance fund, eliminating the age tax credit, and generally, measures that come down hardest on the neediest in our society who are already depressed because they have no work, and are now facing additional constraints.
As in all other areas, it is clear the members of this government are arrogant and cynical in the extreme. I keep repeating this because it is true. Every day I wonder how the Liberals can treat people the way they did, the Liberal members of the finance subcommittee which examined the bill on amendments to the Unemployment Insurance Act. I am really disgusted at the way they behaved.
People came from the Maritimes, all the way from St. John's, Newfoundland, to appear before the committee, which hardly bothered to listen to their grievances about the unemployment insurance cuts. The government did listen to the lobbyists who asked them not to eliminate certain tax conventions with countries that are considered to be tax havens. The government did listen to the richest families in Canada who wanted the government to maintain the outrageous preferential treatment of family trusts.
They came all the way by car, like those who came from the Acadian peninsula, and they were thrown out because they came to express their grievances. They came to say they were ashamed of supporting a government that had promised to put the economy in the Maritimes back on track, but instead had shown it could not care less what happened to them and dozens of communities in the Maritimes.
I get rather emotional whenever I talk about inequity and unfair taxation, because as a newcomer in politics, I sincerely believed that people who for years had been fighting for more tax equity and who made their objections heard every time the Conservatives introduced measures which they themselves condemned, were sincere. I thought that these people were sincere. In spite of our differences of opinion on constitutional matters, I really thought that they were sincere, but I realize now that they are nothing more than good actors. They are excellent, but the play does not last forever.
When I see this kind of measure, when I see the richest Canadians keep their privileges when the poorest members of our society are being asked once again to tighten their belts, this year, next year, and until the end of this government's mandate, I tell myself that, one day, common sense will prevail. People will realize that this government is a puppet government, and that it may be time for Quebec to change the constitutional order of things, to take its future into its own hands, and to implement real measures. It is time for fair taxes, for a Quebec tax system in a sovereign Quebec, based on the principle of equality for all, and taking into account the needs of our poorest citizens.
I have been wishing for and dreaming of such a system. These people are making this dream of a fair tax system even brighter. Let us dispel the nightmare of this unfair federal tax system.