Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.
Who am I? We hate it and we will kill it. The hon. Prime Minister of Canada, May 2, 1994.
Here we are in March 1996. When we go to the store, what do we pay? We pay the GST. It may as well be called the "get stuffed tax" because that is what the Liberals are saying to the Canadian public. They did not get rid of this reviled tax.
When I talk to the people of this country, when I talk to the people of my riding, when I talk to the businesses, no single tax is more reviled than the goods and services tax. It is complicated, it is expensive and it is inefficient. It was misleading for the government before it was elected to promise the people something that they so desperately wanted but which it has not given them. This tax provides $18 billion to the public coffers every year. How much of that actually gets to be used? Two-thirds. One-third of the tax goes into administration. How inefficient can we get? That is completely inefficient.
What the Canadian public needs and wants is tax relief. Reform members want the GST to go and we have a plan. What is that plan? The plan is to balance the budget. We simply cannot provide tax relief and get the GST down without doing that.
What has the government done? When I was elected two years ago, the government had $120 billion to spend on programs such as health care and education. What has it done? It has dropped it to $103 billion because it cannot balance the budget, something everybody here has to do in our private lives. Otherwise, we would go bankrupt. That is what is happening to Canada. We are going bankrupt.
It does every Canadian a great disservice to continue with the mythology that we can spend more than we take in. Two years ago Reformers put forward a specific, sensitive plan that would preserve the core of our social programs, that would preserve the core of health care and education to get the deficit down to zero and bring the debt down which is the true ogre.
We gave the plan to the Liberals and said, use it. Take it for all Canadians. Did they do that? Absolutely not. They continue to mortgage the future of all Canadians and compromise the lives of their children. That is reprehensible.
We have been accused of being the slash and burn party. I submit that we are the only political party that is committed to preserving social programs. We are the only party that has a plan on getting the deficit to zero, bringing the debt down so that we can preserve spending and give the public the desperate tax relief that they demand.
I challenge the members opposite to go into their communities, to speak to people about how they are overburdened by taxes. The GST is but one. Before they decrease the GST, we should get our spending down.
There are actions that the government can take today, and that includes simplifying this odious tax. It is absolutely absurd that the GST in its complexity exists. We can simplify it by businesses only putting in one submission every year. It would also diminish the amount of money that has to be spent on administration which is a complete and utter waste of money.
It shows a deplorable lack of trust and integrity on the part of the government that it will promise things purely to get elected. Reformers have not done that and the public finds it absolutely reprehensible that any political party does that. They will see through this at the time of the next election.
My hon. friend has put forward a brilliant way of simplifying the tax system. The government has done absolutely nothing to simplify a tax system so that the average person can fill out the tax forms.
Reformers are going to provide this year a simplified tax system for all Canadians to use so that they can fill out their own tax forms. Ultimately we will provide a way in which all Canadians will be able to get tax relief. That is the name of the game. We will provide it through a simplified tax system.
Once again I feel it is falling on deaf ears for some strange reason. Tragically for all Canadians the government failed to co-operate and use our constructive solutions to help all Canadians across the country.
Once again I challenge members across and I challenge the government to use our good suggestions. Nobody has a monopoly on suggestions for the country. However, we have a lot of good ones but the government has ignored them, to its peril. These suggestions come from the grassroots of the country.