Mr. Speaker, this is what I was building up to. Under our laws in the Chamber we are not allowed to amend a tax treaty. It states that clearly in our standing orders. We can amend the legislation that brings in the tax treaty. However in introducing an amendment to that legislation we cannot negate the principle of a clause in the tax treaty.
Just imagine the power of the U.S. committees. They actual change treaties. The Minister of Finance had to go back to Washington twice. He signed one, they changed it and he had to go back again.
According to our standing orders our House of Commons is not allowed to change anything in a treaty. The amendments I put forward are amendments that do not negate a clause. The first amendment is that all of these huge tax decreases to American multinationals operating in Canada come to an end in the year 2000. That is amendment number one. We cannot afford giveaways any more.
We are cutting public servants. We have got to. We are cutting back on UI. We are cutting back on this and cutting back on that and at the same time we are introducing this whole new set of tax expenditures, gifts.
That leads me to the second amendment, the gift part. Motion No. 2 relates to the dating back of the tax credit on the estate tax to people who had died since November 10, 1988. Do you get the significance of the date, Mr. Speaker? Perhaps somebody of great wealth did die on November 11, 1988, I do not know. The very date is the date the protocol came into effect in the United States that decreased the maximum from $600,000 to $60,000.
Under this bill there are estates today in Canada verified by Revenue Canada to me and to the committee that are just waiting to put in their bill. Now the Canadian government has to pay for the amount of estate tax that they pay in the United States that was taxed as U.S. source revenue.
The Canadian people have to cough up the money now out of the treasury. I am told that one chap who died had $20 million in the United States. He really got hit with the estate tax, almost $8 million of it had to be paid to the U.S. treasury. He has a nice rebate coming to him from the U.S. government but he has a much bigger rebate coming to him from the Government of Canada. Only $12 million went to the family. Now the people concerned who received the benefits from the estate will be able to bill the Canadian government for an additional $5 million or $6 million in that one year.
The second amendment, seconded by the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood, is that since the Canadian delegation and the U.S. delegation said this is reciprocity, this is to eliminate double taxation, that if there is not double taxation then there will be no money granted. That does not negate the clause at all. It just says if no taxes were paid no rebate will be given as far as the Canadian government is concerned.
The auditor general in 1985 said the Canadian Parliament reminded him of a group of automobile engineers trying to build an automobile that was more efficient, that burned less gas but had the same energy. He said that Parliament is like that because we are trying to find ways of cutting while still maintaining our services to the Canadian people. He said the problem is this.
When the engineers changed the engine of the automobile from eight cylinders to six cylinders to four cylinders and brought in all those modifications to save energy, at the end of the day they discovered they were burning just as much gas as they were before. They did not know what the problem was until they looked under the car and saw all these little holes in the gas tank. Those, the auditor general said, are the tax expenditures of the Government of Canada.
The government cuts and slices and chucks. It lays people off who have children going to school and to university who do not know where their next dollar is going to come from. It changes the system of unemployment insurance. When a primary producer working in this country has as a part of his income unemployment insurance, it says: "Oh no, we are going to take that away because that was not intended for that". That person is worried to death today.
While we do all of that, we turn around and take a Senate bill that will give enormous returns to very wealthy people, very rich people, and we say to the multinationals we are going to cut your taxes by 50 per cent.
We are not going to do anything for the very poor. We are not going to do anything for Canadian corporations operating in Canada. That is why I think, after looking at the bills we are
discussing, what is really happening in real terms of tax expenditure is that we take from the poor and give to the rich.
It is Robin Hood in reverse. He is now working for the great companies that represent those very multinationals in the United States that are working so well in this country, a country that according to the World Bank is the second wealthiest country in the world because we have resources.
The House of Commons today, with the Bloc and the Reform Party supporting this legislation wholeheartedly, is not working. The Canadian people are saying that we need a change in the rules of procedure or we need to get rid of the two opposition parties.