Madam Speaker, I listened with interest to the remarks of my colleague opposite, and I would like to say that the bill is nothing more, in the opinion of the Bloc, than a collection of amendments to the GST.
In addition to several dozen small technical changes on exemptions from payment of the GST, there are a series of amendments providing for the harmonization of the GST with the sales taxes of the three maritime provinces. In Bill C-70, the GST becomes a harmonized sales tax, as the Minister of Finance describes it.
The bill also provides an exemption from federal sales tax, and this applies right across the country, for books bought by public libraries, schools, colleges, universities and other organizations involved in literacy programs.
We received this bill at the last minute and we in the official opposition deplore the way the Minister of Finance tabled these documents. The official opposition had less than 24 hours to examine the text of a bill of over 300 pages, which came without any explanatory notes. In this way, the government is trying to avoid debate and to keep the real issues hidden from the people of Canada.
The Liberals do not keep their promises, to say the least. The Deputy Prime Minister should resign again. The GST is with us for the duration, as Bill C-70 pointedly indicates. The Prime Minister promised transparency in the last election campaign. The Liberals are doing now what they criticized the Conservatives for doing in the past. The new GST is a hidden tax, because it is buried in the selling price of goods and services.
The 1994 Liberal majority report stated that it would simply be wrong to keep Canadians in the dark as to what they were paying in taxes to their governments, and a hidden tax would make it difficult for them to force the government to account for the way taxes are collected and, to a lesser extent, for the way public funds are spent.
The Minister of Finance is today presenting us with the hidden tax he criticized at the time. Furthermore, in 1989, the dissenting report of the minority Liberal opposition stated: "In addition, if the GST is hidden in the selling price, it will be much easier for the government to increase it later on".
The old Liberal federal sales tax was hidden in the price. The Conservatives made it visible by creating the GST as we know it. With the proposed agreement with the maritimes before us today, the Liberals are again hiding this much hated tax. There is always this double talk: They say one thing when in opposition and another when in office.
In 1989, the Liberals tore out their hair over this issue, but now that they are in office, they are hiding the GST as if nothing had happened, as if this tax had never existed.
This is a disgrace. This shows selective memory. The Liberals boast about listening to businesses. But when the Canadian Chamber of Commerce surveyed its members in 1994, it concluded that 70 per cent of Canadian businesses were against hiding this tax. In February 1996, the same organization surveyed its members again, only to find again that 76 per cent of them were against hiding this tax. For a government that boasts about listening to business, it does not seem to be listening very well.
Let us take a look at the compensation formula, which is in fact a $1 billion political present. But the real cost is that of harmonizing with the maritime provinces.
In a shameless exercise in window dressing, the Minister of Finance has paid off the maritimes so that they would help him honour an election promise that had not been acted on. One billion dollars is what Quebecers and Canadians from the other provinces will have to pay for an election promise that was not kept by the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister. One billion dollars is what this measure is really costing us.
There is no mention of the compensation formula in Bill C-70. The MOUs provided for some $961 million in compensation. We are still waiting for the Minister of Finance to unveil the criteria for his compensation package and to clearly show that Quebec is not entitled to such compensation.
In spite of Quebec's repeated requests to that effect, the federal government has turned a deaf ear. The objective is always the same: to penalize Quebec and particularly Quebecers, who elected a sovereignist government. This compensation may be a political gift to make the Liberal UI reform, which adversely affects seasonal workers in the maritimes, more palatable to the population of these provinces. Otherwise, why would Ontario, Quebec and the other provinces not be entitled to such compensation for harmonizing their sales tax with the federal one?
This cost of $1 billion over the next four years will be largely exceeded. The result of reducing the tax base at the consumer's level from 19 per cent down to 15 per cent will be that, in future, Quebecers and Canadians from the other provinces will have to pay more equalization to the maritimes.
These additional equalization costs will be paid by all taxpayers in Canada and Quebec. The commitment made by the finance minister to the governments of the maritime provinces is not acceptable, when you compare the cushy deal reached with the maritime provinces on harmonization with what happened in Quebec in recent years.
The agreement reached by the federal government and the three maritime provinces will eventually be expanded to include all Canadian provinces. At the present time, the majority of Canadians are against the minister's plan, against the introduction of a single 15 per cent tax, to be collected by the Canadian revenue commission the government wants to set up.
The tax burden would thus increase in Quebec, in Ontario, and in several other Canadian provinces. Bill C-70 will have a number of consequences for Quebec. For many years now, the Government of Quebec has made a genuine effort to harmonize federal and provincial tax bases. Quebec collects and administers for the federal government the GST such as we now know it in Quebec. We have therefore worked very hard in Quebec to bring about this harmonization at no cost to other Canadians.
This bill is unfair to Quebec on more than one count. Quebec's fiscal autonomy would be undermined by the Canadian revenue commission, which would be responsible for administering the new 15 per cent GST. The present harmonization worked out
between Quebec and Ottawa is therefore a far cry from the minister of finance's bill, whatever the Liberals might say.
Quebec will never agree to take part in such a fiscal regime. This new attempt by the federal government to interfere in provincial jurisdiction must be denounced.
Far from harmonizing federal and provincial sales taxes, this bill stands a good chance of jeopardizing several years of efforts by Quebec to achieve harmonization with federal taxation. The existing harmonization in Quebec was accomplished with the consent of both parties, and in all good will.
Today, the Minister of Finance is scrapping all the agreements signed with Quebec and trying to replace them with a bill that is nothing more than a pre-election ploy.
The government has made only partial use of a measure proposed by the Bloc Quebecois, so the public ends up with a half-victory. In our opinion, however, even with this GST credit on books, the government is not going far enough.
Ever since Quebec introduced the QST, all books have been exempt from the provincial sales tax, and not just those purchased by literacy institutions, schools, public libraries and so on. All books are QST exempt, including those purchased by consumers in bookstores, which represent the bulk of GST revenues on book sales.
The measure announced by the Minister of Finance is, therefore, a cosmetic one, designed merely to enable the Liberals to boast that they have eliminated the GST on books, when in fact they have not done anything of the sort. Taxing books means taxing knowledge, making it even less accessible to certain members of society.
This does, however, represent a half-victory for the Bloc Quebecois and for the public, in that we have been battling from the very beginning, even as far back as when the Conservatives were in power, to eliminate the tax on books. For this to become a total victory, however, all books would have to be exempted from this GST disguised as a harmonized sales tax, not just books bought by literacy and educational organizations.
What the Liberals are aiming at with Bill C-70 is, in fact, nothing more than a whitewash, a diversionary tactic, at which they are experts, and which is what has kept them in power for so many years. The moment of truth is at hand. They will have to answer to the Canadian public in the next election. Then their poor track record will speak for itself.
Rather than passing this bill, the Bloc Quebecois proposes a concrete revision of the corporate taxation system. According to our analysis, the federal government could recover up to $3 billion annually by revising or abolishing certain outmoded, inefficient and unfair tax expenditures, using the money instead to encourage businesses to create jobs.
In today's struggling labour market, the purpose of corporate taxation ought to be to encourage the creation of good, lasting jobs, while ensuring that the funding of public services is equitably divided between corporations and individuals, and among the corporations themselves.
A number of analysts see a problem in the way taxes are collected in Canada: While the tax rate on profits is lower than elsewhere in the world, capital and payroll taxes are higher. This discourages job creation. Instead of remedying this situation, the Liberal government is attempting to hide yet another broken election promise. What a poor record the Liberals have to show for themselves after three years in power.