Mr. Speaker, before I get into my remarks, my colleague from Swift Current reminds me that the official opposition is going into a leadership race and that the member for Vegreville may be resurrecting his campaign for that position.
In talking about the goods and services tax and the harmonization that Bill C-70 represents, it is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to what has been going on for the last few years, particularly since the run up to the 1993 election and since, that this bill is a cruel hoax perpetrated on the people of Canada, particularly the people of Atlantic Canada.
It is a political ploy designed to provide the illusion that the government and the Liberals are doing something about the goods and services tax. It was an issue in the last campaign. My colleagues have gone on all afternoon highlighting the statements, promises and remarks that were made by government members when they were running in the 1993 election.
The bill is designed to give Canadians the impression that the government is trying to make good on an irresponsible promise it should never have made and ought to have known better. I certainly believe that there are many members opposite, including the Prime Minister, as the evidence shows, and including the finance minister, who knew better than to make a promise they could not keep. They knew at the time they could not keep that promise but they went ahead and made it anyway in order to attract electoral support and to convince Canadians to vote Liberal in the last election.
They knew full well the deep resentment that Canadians held for the Conservatives for bringing in the goods and services tax. They knew what a hot button issue it was. They said: "Vote for us, folks, and we will get rid of it". They had no intention of doing that. As a matter of fact, they knew it could not be done. Any responsible Liberal knew it could not be done, but they went ahead and promised it anyway.
Now we have shifted away from kill, abolish and scrap, which was the election promise of so many current MPs who were running for the Liberal Party, and now it is replace.
When I thought about what I might say today, I knew I would have to choose my words carefully. I do have respect for the Chair and for this institution. I do not have a lot of respect all the time for what the government does in the House and what certain members opposite try to say to Canadians.
I have a friend in northern B.C. who has a rather laconic way of describing people who habitually cannot tell the truth, or who habitually lie. He says that somebody who does that would rather lie on credit when they could get cash for the truth. I think that is what we are faced with here. We are faced with a government and high profile cabinet ministers who would prefer to mislead Canadians in an election campaign in order to attract electoral support when they know full well that they cannot live up to the promises they have made. It also shows that the government, time and time again, will put political interests ahead of the best interests of the country. A case in point is this harmonization bill. It is designed to create the illusion that the government is actually doing something about the GST. In fact, it is a billion dollar rip-off for the rest of Canada, those people who live outside Atlantic Canada, and it will hurt the people who live in Atlantic Canada. Many of them have already come to that conclusion.
How many stories have we heard in recent weeks about small businesses having to close? They are telling the government not to proceed. They cannot possibly live with this additional tax. Consumers in Atlantic Canada know this means an additional tax burden on them. It is a hoax. It is not going to make anything better, it is going to make things worse.
Why is the government proceeding with it at this time? Why does it not come clean with Canadians and say: "We made a mistake. We should not have said that we were going to kill, scrap and abolish the GST because we cannot do it. Now, in the best interests of the country, let us balance the books. Let us get rid of the deficit and after that we will slowly start to reduce the GST until we can phase it out altogether". That is the responsible thing to say to Canadians. It is certainly what my colleagues in the Reform Party are saying to Canadians. It is what we believe.
If the justice minister will let us keep our guns, we will find a way to hunt that GST down a couple of years after we balance the books and we will kill it, but not before we balance the books and not before we eliminate the deficit.
This relates to other taxation issues, in that the government collects taxes and fees for services for specific commodities and services with the unwritten promise that those moneys collected are going to be used for the purposes which the government has identified.
For example, 60 cents out of every dollar that a Canadian spends at the gas pump goes to taxation of one form or another. A lot of it is road tax. A lot of that is collected on the basis that the moneys are going to be used to build new infrastructure or maintain existing roads and bridges. You do not have to be a rocket scientist or an engineer to see the state of Canada's infrastructure at the present time. You do not have to drive a great deal to notice the state of Canada's roads and bridges. Yet the government continues to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel taxes designed for roads and bridges. Where does the money go? It goes into the big black debt hole here in Ottawa.
We cannot forget that the government of the day, that wonderful Progressive Conservative Party, which introduced the GST in the first place, said: "We are making a solemn promise. When we introduce this tax we are going to use it to reduce the deficit." Does anybody remember that? By how much did that government reduce the deficit? I do not think there is a Canadian who believes that the Progressive Conservative Party ever intended to reduce the deficit. I do not think there is a Canadian who, at this stage of the game, believes that the Liberals intended to kill, scrap and abolish the GST, even though that is what they solemnly promised to do in the last election.