Madam Speaker, Okanagan-Shuswap is probably the best place in Canada and maybe even in the whole world. It is a great place to live.
Unfortunately we have the same problem as most people in Canada have. We are here today to speak to Bill C-70. In case people out there do not understand exactly what this bill entails, here it is. It is totally unbelievable. It contains 335 pages on how to harmonize a tax. I would hate to figure out the cost of each page. Believe me, Madam Speaker, you probably will not make that much in your lifetime nor in mine nor in a number of other lifetimes in this House.
This government has spent hundreds of hours and days trying to figure out how to broaden the tax base in this country.
Let us take a look at what they mean by broadening the tax base. I want the people who are listening and every member in this House to understand that whenever a politician talks about tax that means they are going to raise the level of tax. That is what it means, no matter what they say.
The Liberals spent days, weeks, months trying to figure out a way to soft sell this to the people. They spent millions of dollars to figure out one word that the public might just accept: harmonize. All they had to do was look it up in the dictionary but I suppose that would have been too simple.
So now we are looking at this harmonization of taxation. We try to debate this issue but the government has decided that we do not need any more debate in this House. It does not want any debate in this House. The government would not like the people outside this House or off the Hill, those people who have a life outside of these walls, to even know what goes on in this House and therefore will invoke closure.