I have to find the right words-misleading words, which Canadians are simply not going to buy. Canadians are tired of being misled on a whole variety of issues and they are not going to accept it any more.
I have talked for a few minutes about one of the two issues that I have identified as being ones that are important and which flow from this whole debate over family trusts and the finance committee's criticizing the auditor general. I have talked about the attempt by the government to shift responsibility over to, in this case, an independent officer of the House, the auditor general. In other cases the government has tried to shift responsibility to whomever it thinks it can.
The second issue I wanted to raise is the whole issue of the confusing taxation system. The government has been in power for three years. Why has it not clarified this particular fine point of taxation law which is so much in discussion and part of the controversy we are talking about today? The fact of the matter is until this issue was raised nobody did anything about it, despite the fact that the government has been in power for three years.
It is fairly clear that Canadians are concerned about how confusing the taxation system is. As the hon. member for Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot pointed out a few minutes ago, when it is $50 that the average guys owes the government goes after them hammer and claw. It is no secret that the government has actually cranked up its revenue department to go after anybody at all who looks like they have missed including a penny on their taxation forms. There is no question-and I am sure hon. members will attribute to this-that there are more and more people who are complaining to MPs about how vigorous the taxation department has become in scraping every cent out of its pocketbooks so that it can continue to bring more revenue into the government. That is another issue which I will touch on in a moment.
The taxation system is extremely confusing. The Income Tax Act is 2,000 pages thick. There are currently 10,000 cases before the courts on the issue of taxation law. There are all kinds of people who have very serious concerns about the complexity of the tax system.
One of the promises which our party has made is that we would look at the complexity of the taxation system. People have a basic right to understand how the taxation system works. When the government is taking half of a person's money in taxes, it is a basic right for people to be able to understand why the government is taking the money and what it proposes to do with it.
Since this government came to power we have seen 33 tax increases. I have a feeling that people would be a lot more sympathetic to the taxation system in general if overall taxes were not so high. Right now somewhere in the range of 50 cents on every dollar earned goes to pay taxes. That is scandalous. The Bloc Quebecois was talking about a scandal. That is scandalous.
Perhaps people do not realize that since 1983, since the Tories came to power and then the Liberals after them, we have seen
federal personal taxes increase $4,000 a year per individual taxpayer. That is absolutely ridiculous. Then there are excise taxes, which have increased another $1,100 a year.
The finance minister has talked about how he has not raised personal taxes. That simply is not the case. He has raised personal taxes. He has done all kinds of things to do that. There have been 33 tax increases of various kinds since the government came to power. People have felt it in their pocketbooks.
Somebody suggested to me the other day that what should happen for people to really appreciate how much governments are taxing them is for them to write out a cheque every month to send into Revenue Canada for their taxes, as opposed to having those taxes come directly off their paycheques. Then people would come to appreciate just how heavily they are being taxed. Many people understand that.
The average family of four in Canada makes an income of somewhere around $54,000. Roughly half of that, $27,000, goes to pay taxes of all kinds. If someone had to write a cheque to Revenue Canada every month for taxes, it would be well over $2,000 a month. A mortgage payment of $1,000 is a pretty big payment every month. But stop and consider for a moment that people would have to cut a cheque for over $2,000 a month to pay the taxes in this country. It is absolutely outrageous.
We talk about people who are fearful for their jobs. We talk about people who are afraid to start a business, afraid to risk any money they have saved. And how can they save very much when taxes are this high? We wonder why we have an unemployment problem in this country. To me it is not a very complicated problem. When we are paying that much in taxes, how is it possible to save the kind of money that is needed to start businesses? It is virtually impossible.
I will give another example of how the government is working against the ability of people to save money and start businesses and create jobs. This is a perfect example of how the government has proceeded with its tax increases.
On April 22 there was a change in the tax rules affecting the notional input tax credit. When I try to explain it, it becomes very complicated and people just throw up their hands and their eyes glaze over. The net effect of it is that it removes about a billion dollars from the bottom line of small businesses. According to some estimates it amounts to a billion dollars a year. That means those small businesses have to find that billion dollars somewhere else.
Where do they find it? They either find it by charging higher prices to consumers and therefore that tax increase is passed on, or they let people go or perhaps close down their business. Again
people become unemployed. The government has done this over and over and over again.
When we are talking about the taxation system and the point I was trying to make a few minutes ago, I think people would be a lot more willing to suffer with a complicated taxation system if they knew that the government was not using the fact that the system was so complicated and so mystifying to people to raise taxes in a surreptitious way as it has done time and time again.
Another good example is the move to limit how much a person can contribute to RRSPs. That is not a direct tax on personal incomes but the effect is exactly the same as if the government put a tax on personal incomes. What happens is that people end up having to pay more income taxes because they cannot save the money they have traditionally saved through RRSPs for their retirement. On the other hand the Canada pension plan is really in trouble and the government's response to that is to limit the amount that can be put into RRSPs so that people can provide for themselves in their retirement.
Why not give people the dignity of being able to save for their retirement? But the government continuously works in surreptitious ways against the interests of people who are trying to provide for themselves, trying to create jobs by starting small businesses, people who simply want to have a few dollars put away so that perhaps they can take a vacation when they get older, put their kids through university and have the things that back in the 1960s and early 1970s people just took for granted.
I do not think Canadians are demanding a lot. They do not want some utopia in the future. They want the same kind of country we used to have. They want a country where there are balanced budgets, where governments live within their means, where there are small governments which are not in their faces at every turn and every step they take.
Canadians want some reasonable division of responsibilities between different levels of government. Do we really need to have different levels of government involved in every aspect of our lives? Do we have to have three levels of government looking after the environment? Do we have to have two levels of government involved in mining, tourism and agriculture? People want smaller government. They want a balanced budget. They want a taxation system they can understand. I do not think it is being unreasonable.
Canadians want taxes that are high enough I suppose, in that they are willing to pay taxes to look after some basic social programs. They want health care and some kind of a pension plan. But they do not want taxes going into all these wacky social engineering programs that we have seen in the past. They do not want tax dollars going into job training programs that bear no fruit as we have seen over and over again. They say let people who know how to do it do it.
Canadians do not want to see tax dollars going into regional development programs where we fund all kinds businesses which in turn use those dollars to compete against the people who are the ones who contributed the tax dollars in the first place. That is crazy. We end up putting prosperous businesses out of work or putting them under by subsidizing businesses that have been unprofitable to that point. That is crazy yet the government somehow cannot get the message.
I am grateful the Bloc has raised this issue today. I do think there are two big issues that have come from it and I will just touch on them briefly as I sum up.
The issue of the auditor general reporting on the apparent irregularity in tax law points to a couple of different major issues. One of them is the fact that the government has tried to shift the responsibility away from itself on to the auditor general, someone who has saved us billions of dollars in the past. We only wish that everybody in the government would be so vigilant in finding waste.
The other big issue is our confusing tax system. Our member for Calgary Centre has spent hours and hours speaking to people across Canada about the need to reform our taxation system. We hope that this issue will help bring home the need for government to do that.
I want to conclude by saying a word about the auditor general. It is very important when we have these independent officers of the House that the government think long and hard before criticizing these people. It is no secret that the auditor general and successive auditors general have saved the House billions of dollars over the years.
The one final request I would make is for the government to learn a lesson from the auditor general and to apply the same powers to an ethics commissioner. Then as part of the opposition we would not be talking about all the scandals we have to talk about.