Mr. Speaker, I am certain that not too many people will be paying for the Reform Party cultural document.
It amazes me to hear the hon. member mention this legislation is all for the wealthy and the rich and yet the same person turned around and defended the capital gains tax. The capital gains tax was purely directed to people of higher incomes. I can prove the people who received the benefits of that deduction were the higher income, wealthier people, the very people the Reform Party represents in the House.
There is a little problem with arithmetic here. The bottom line is anybody who is making a donation of, for example, $10,000 will get a $5,000 tax credit. It costs them money. This is not some kind of gift to the wealthy. They made a donation of their cultural property, be that the group of seven artists or Cornelius Krieghoff, so that it would stay in Canada and be the property of the people of Canada. This is something the Reform Party fails to understand.
The other thing that seems striking to me is that the Reform Party talks about getting rid of this and having a flat tax. I want to put things in perspective. The Reform Party does not want to admit this but the flat tax is designed to assist and help anybody who has an income of over $200,000.
The president of the United States with all of his analysts went through the whole concept of a flat tax years ago. He asked them to prove to him how it would not be the major system for people with over $200,000 income. It stands to proper reason that if we are trying to collect x dollars from the taxation system and there is a flat tax we will allocate taxes from the upper income groups to the middle income earners. That is what the Reform Party would have us believe. That is who the Reform Party is representing in the House.
The reality is the cultural products some people have are usually part of an estate. As part of settling that estate they give a good portion of these artefacts to the government through the museum system. These are things our museums would not be able to acquire. It is not a loophole, it is an incentive to keep those products in Canada.
How can he defend the capital gains tax system but not this system and how can he defend a flat tax system but not this system?