Mr. Speaker, I am happy to follow the previous rant from the member for St. Paul's. It is the first we heard from the Liberals today on the issue and gives me an opportunity to address some of his comments.
It was interesting when he said this move was in the interest of Atlantic Canada. Yet few members on the government side from Atlantic Canada are willing to speak to the issue. Very few members are willing to speak to the issue of GST harmonization. Almost none from Atlantic Canada. One spoke earlier today, the hon. member for Gander-Grand Falls. We can check the blues, but I do not think he mentioned GST anywhere in his speech. He obviously was not too thrilled about the initiative.
The government makes the point that it must be governing for the benefit of the people of Atlantic Canada because the Liberal government in Atlantic Canada likes this initiative. The role of the Parliament of Canada, I would remind the parliamentary secretary, is to govern for the benefit of the people of Canada; not just the people of Atlantic Canada but all Canadians.
Interestingly enough we did not hear mention of the people of Atlantic Canada. Where are the petitions to Parliament demanding this harmonized GST? Where are the letters of endorsement from the business community and from consumers groups? We are not getting them in our offices. We are getting precisely the opposite.
The federal government should have a broader view of what is in the interest of the people of any region of the country than just what the party of the government thinks in a particular region.
We get the same line every time the Reform, the Bloc or any other party criticizes a Liberal government initiative directed at a specific region. Its members always say they are the guardians of the region. They ask where we were when they were giving something to our region or to somebody else. The great tragedy of the country is governments that do not govern for the entire country. Historically governments, particularly Liberal governments, have used policies to divide, conquer and pit one against another so they can act as the defender of one region at any point in history, depending on where they need to pick up some votes.
It is a terrible way of approaching government, but that is the history. I am addressing second reading of Bill C-70 on GST harmonization which, as has been pointed out by many speakers, is being implemented with time allocation.
It is important to point out that this bill was read for the first time in this House only on December 2, just over a week ago. This is only the third day we have had any debate at all on this piece of legislation.
The hon. member for Burlington, a Liberal member, had a tremendous argument. This one we need to get bronzed over here. It was that they would not need to move time allocation if the opposition would just support their bills. That would make it much easier.
There is a pattern here. We saw this pattern not just in this fall sitting but in previous sittings in the last three years. That has been that we have had a very slow legislative agenda for several months.
Just as the House is about to rise for a break, important legislation appears which must be passed immediately. In this sitting, the fall sitting, we passed only nine pieces of legislation, including some supply bills and housekeeping measures that were of fairly minor significance.
Last week three pieces of legislation were introduced which most analysts of Parliament would argue are the three most important bills introduced in the fall sitting, the harmonization of the GST, amendments to the Canadian Wheat Board, and the tobacco legislation. These are three of the most important bills.
Now they must all be passed according to some rushed schedule. I should add, just a couple of weeks before that, changes to the rules for the next election campaign. That is probably the fourth most important. It came in only three weeks before the end of the session.
Why does the government do it this way? I have tried to figure that out. Why are we rushing, for instance, an important debate on a GST package in order to have a prebudget debate, which the government will have no intention of listening to whatsoever? It is not on a substantive piece of legislation. Why are we doing this?
Some of it may be disorganization. Some of it may be unclear priorities. I fear the longer I am here the reason it does some of this is it really ultimately wants to rush committee stage of these bills.
Committee stage is where the public and affected interests get to express their views on the bill to indicate where amendments should be made and where parliamentarians and other expert witnesses are able to go over the clause by clause of a bill to suggest technical amendments.
That is the stage the government wants to rush. It has been increasingly rushing it, even on important legislation. The consequences of that have been very obvious in this Parliament to observers. Often we are passing legislation that is not well thought out, that is poorly drafted technically and that ends up being amended or delayed in the Senate.
I suspect we will see that happen again, if not on this bill at least on one of these three bills we are now rushing.
We have today the Liberal Party bringing in a bill to support and enhance the position of the GST across the country. I will not dwell too much on that. It is tremendously humourous to see the Liberal Party now being the one enacting the new version of the GST.
Perhaps even funnier than that was the appearance of the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party to vote against the GST. Of course, just his mere appearance in the House of Commons is funny enough, seeing how infrequently it seems to occur.
Let us go back to the original GST. The original GST was discussed in a white paper presented by the previous government in 1987 and implemented in the 1990-91 period. It is important for me to acknowledge, as I want to address a serious issue here, that many conservative people in the country, many business people, very conservatively oriented people, were very supportive of the thrust of the GST, at least initially. Some still are.
Why was this? It is important to understand why some supported it and why they do not today and why it is an error to support this tax.
They supported it because of the deficiencies of the existing manufacturer's sales tax. They supported it because it was a value added tax implemented in a multi-level way that ideally would not distort prices. On top of that it was a consumption based tax which therefore would not have strong incentives against investment.
However, these were very short term reasons for anybody to support this tax. They were very short term reasons because the real issue this country has been facing for the last 10 years and will face for the next few at least is the deficit and whether we will end the enormous deficits of this federal government by increasing taxes or whether we will end them by cutting spending; in other words, whether we will ultimately balance the budget in this country by having very big government or by having much smaller government. Of course, big government got us into this economic situation in the first place and we favour a solution that will bring us back to smaller government.
If we take a big picture look at the GST, the big problem with it is not the specifics of its construction. It is in the end a powerful revenue generator, one that works best if hidden. It makes it easy to raise rates, easy to broaden the base, and it brings the federal government into an area that is traditionally provincial authority. It leads to tax collusion rather than the phrase harmonization or rather than competition between governments.
That is what we see happening with this GST harmonization today. We see a deal that buys off the Liberal Party in the Atlantic provinces, that uses the term harmonization for essentially arranging a collusion scheme between governments to make it easier for them in the future to raise taxes. They can do it with a majority vote. But it makes it virtually impossible for them to ever lower the rates of taxation. It takes another step toward hiding and burying taxes in prices and it broadens the base of existing provincial sales taxes on Atlantic consumers.
The real agenda of the Liberal Party is to make sure the fiscal actions it takes, both on the spending and taxation sides, ultimately secure big government and high taxes in this country. I believe that in the end this is what has caused the slow economic growth in the past generation. This will ensure the country continues to slip.
We need another way. This harmonization of the GST, this tax collusion between provincial and federal Liberal governments, is not the way to reverse the economic decline of this country.