Mr. Speaker, the Reform Party also supports the bill. I will be speaking generally in favour of the bill.
Before I do I will take a couple of seconds and speak to the referendum last night. We cannot pretend that did not happen. We cannot just walk into this place and sleepwalk toward a further disaster.
The hon. parliamentary secretary had a few words to preface his remarks and my blood ran cold when I listened. The essence of what he said was that he welcomed those people who were trying to break up our country over the last couple of years and last night. He welcomed them back and said let us go on as before, working in committee and working in the House.
For the last two years going on before meant that every single word that came out of the mouth of the Bloc, and everyone in the Chamber knows it, has been to one direction, toward building a preface for the referendum last night for taking Quebec out of Confederation.
We cannot go on as before. We have to turn the page on that. We have to go forward. We have had 30 years, all of my adult life, of trying to appease people who would break up the country. It is time to stop it. All it does is foster a festering tribalism evidenced last night for everyone to see on national television by the premier of Quebec.
If we pretend this kind of thing is not going on in our country we are not doing our jobs as representatives of the people who sent us here. Tribalism is tribalism and that is what we have had here for the last two years. Let us not call it anything else.
To the embarrassment of Canadians everywhere, because the vast majority of Liberals opposite are afraid to confront the Bloc, to confront this tribalism, to confront these people, at every opportunity they get they back away. They back away from it in committee. They back away from it in all opportunities in the House. We recognize the Bloc has 53 seats. It is the loyal opposition but that does not need to be the way the House operates.
No one has ever retreated to victory. One does not build a country on appeasement. One builds a country on the values we share. We should be defining the values that make up Canadianism to be a Canadian. It does not matter what language one speaks, what race one is, these are the values that unite us as a country.
I will get on to Bill C-102. The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance explained in good detail exactly what the bill is all about.
We support it for essentially the reasons he said. It is a step in the right direction. It is a step to breaking down trade barriers. My hon. colleague from the Bloc is quite right when he asks why we would set up trade barriers between the rest of Canada and Quebec when we are trying to knock trade barriers down between us and the United States.
We are in the process of breaking down trade barriers. One of the ways to do that in a free trade agreement is to, as GATT has forced us to do, start looking at the zillions of financial transactions that take place with us and the Americans on a daily basis and ask how we can make them easier. That is what the bill does.
Many Canadians travel very often to the United States, as I have on occasion with my family, with our pooch Rex in the back seat. Coming across the border, as we are wont to do, we add up all of our purchases. Especially after becoming a member of Parliament I start sweating about an hour before I get to the border making sure I have everything because the last thing I want to do is find myself in Frank magazine for having smuggled something across the border.
I start to sweat about an hour before we hit the border and I have a list. By the time we get a little closer my wife is upset. She says: "For goodness sake, why do you not forget it? Let's just go". We have everything listed and we are prepared to stop and pay the 5 cents or 50 cents or $5 duty or whatever it is.
The last time we got to the border and we had these itemized lists the customs agent asked how long we had been gone. I said six days. We had our list ready and he said he had good news for us: "Keep on going, there is no duty applicable on this".
That makes great sense. We are absolutely thrilled the government is doing this. The government is also going one step further. It is trusting Canadians to make declarations on what they have.
It is very prudent of the government to carry a big stick. If we as Canadians break our trust and smuggle things through, we do not pay the duty or we do not pay the sales tax applicable, the government should reserve the right to come down hard on us.
The changes in the bill, forced by GATT, by the free trade agreement, are obviously steps in the right direction which we support wholeheartedly.
However, it would seem to me that if somehow we could inculcate within the whole apparatus of government the notion of common sense, we could make life a lot simpler for a whole lot of Canadians doing business.
I want to recount the story of Western Carpet Distributors Inc. in my constituency. A few years ago it was one of the primary distributors of carpet in western Canada. The carpet manufacturers had distributors who would in turn sell their carpets for them. Recently the carpet industry in Canada became vertically integrated. That means that the manufacturers started to sell directly to the retailers without the middleman, without the distributor. When one started doing it they all started doing it.
This left my constituent, Western Carpet Distributors, in a kind of bind. He had built his business over the years and it was a prosperous, successful business. All of a sudden he found that his suppliers were selling direct and no longer selling to him. The carpet manufacturers bought up many suppliers, but for whatever reason they did not buy his business. He was left in a situation where he was competing with the very companies he had built in the first place by supplying product to retailers.
When faced with this, as a businessman is wont to do, he found other suppliers. The other suppliers he found were in the United States. He then had to import material from the United States and sell in competition to the vertically integrated suppliers manufacturing and selling their own carpet in Canada. Because these manufacturers sold in Canada, he had a significant tariff put on his product.
Now it starts to get fairly complicated. The cost of his product should include the retailing or the selling expense. He was not allowed to claim that and had to pay duty on it, yet his competitors did not. This was a fairly substantial blow to him. There is a thick file at Revenue Canada, as he has been trying to get this changed but to absolutely no avail.
We have another situation in which he is caught up, adjusting to that, paying the premium. He is now in a situation where a company that manufactures in the United States, sells to its Canadian subsidiary, a wholly owned subsidiary who then retails, is able to get a cash discount before delivery of 5 per cent. This is within its own family. The manufacturer sells to its wholly owned Canadian distributor but can take a 5 per cent discount. The same Canadian distributor I am talking about does a deal with his competitor and he is not allowed to take that. That is considered a reduction in price, and he has to pay duty on it.
We are treating two apples like apples and oranges. This should not be. If we are prepared to give individual citizens the freedom and the right to be held personally liable and give them the trust to come back and forth across the border, should we not also do exactly the same thing with Canadian businesses? Should we not give Canadian businesses the same trust and responsibility? If they misuse that responsibility, we should come down hard on them like a ton of bricks. But if in the normal course of business they are doing what is not only reasonable but right and makes common sense, why do we not extend that to this sector as well?
Perhaps it is because there would be an army-I do not know; I am sure no one has even thought of it. But if we were to take this to its natural conclusion, there are a lot of things in our Canadian life that we could do as citizens and do not need governments to do for us. We do not need a whole building full of people with sharp little pencils trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong, who is doing what and who is not doing what. If we are going to have free trade, let us have free trade.
In conclusion, I want to put a few remarks forward on this bill just to ensure that they are on the record.
Bill C-102 and bills like Bill C-102 restore faith in the business sector in imports and exports. They help to bring our country to a competitive level. This is good. However, because of our complicated tax system Canadian investors are still investing outside of Canada more than they are in Canada.
We would support this bill. We would ask that the government continue to bring forward bills such as this and try to make life simpler for Canadians as individuals and businesses so that we can face the future in a much more competitive spirit.