Mr. Speaker, I will be speaking of course to Bill C-11 this morning, the simplified customs tariff.
Sometimes a low profile bill like this does not get a lot of attention. It is not front and centre in the media. It does not get all the excitement around it that some of the other bills do. But I want to say this morning how important this bill is because of its very significance around what it represents. Bureaucracies in general have a tendency to grow and if left unchecked, they just grow and grow and grow.
This particular piece of legislation that is being proposed is counter to that bureaucratic current of continual growth. I am going to come back to that concept later but I would like first of all to go through some of the highlights of this particular piece of legislation. I may touch on some of the notes of the previous speaker but as I go through these highlights I would ask members of the House to focus on the efficiencies and the countercurrent to bureaucratic growth that is inherent in this piece of legislation and consider applying this same kind of approach to other pieces of legislation and other parts of the bureaucracy.
First, this particular piece of legislation focused on reducing the custom duties on the goods that are used in the manufacturing process in Canada, allowing Canadian businesses to better compete in the international marketplace.
Second, this piece of legislation totally eliminated some of the tariffs and duties for products in a not made in Canada category. This allowed Canadian businesses to improve their competitiveness on a broader range of duty free imports, but maybe even more important is the sea of red tape that that one change allowed. No longer do we have to go through an onerous process of determining what is a not made in Canada product and trying to track that as the situation changes in Canada both by government and industry.
I would like to also mention the clean-up that was done on the concessionary tariff codes. Many of these concessionary codes, as the previous member mentioned, had become obsolete. Two thousand of them in total were either eliminated or restructured and put in place as regular tariff schedule items. There are great gains in efficiency there.
In addition we had the elimination of the machinery remission program, duties remitted on machinery that was not available in Canada. This program had a huge administrative cost both for the private sector and for government in the determination of what is the machinery that is not available in Canada and how do we track it as the situation changes, applying for the remission and then tracking to make sure one actually got the remission cheque. Then there was all the discussion around whether or not it applied to the legislation that was in place. This was a great simplification of the tariff that is inherent in this new legislation which we fully endorse.
There was also the clean-up and elimination of those duties that were expressed in dollars and cents numbers rather than a percentage. The majority of tariffs are in a percentage but there were some that were still expressed in dollars and cents. It was much more appropriate to move them all into the one common format of percentage. It allows for much greater ease of use. It is also more appropriate as the price of the tariff item changes.
In addition some of the trade developments that have occurred in Canada made some of the regulations obsolete. Three hundred different remission orders and regulations were revoked. Seventy others were replaced with simple tariff items. Again all of this reduced the regulatory burden.
In addition there was a rationalization of the tariff schedule which was terrifically unwieldy the way it was before. There was the elimination of nuisance rates. Anything that was less than 2% tariff was eliminated. There was a rounding off of numbers to make it easier to apply the tariff. There was a harmonization of rates on like products. There was an amalgamation and a fixing of anomalies.
None of this is particular earth shaking. None of it is particularly difficult to do. It just took work. But the benefits to Canadian business and the Canadian government are substantial. The cumulative effect is a more predictable, simplified tariff legislation with less regulatory burden and increased competitive strength. Some aspects of Canadian business I would suggest are even ready for a lot more of this.
After touching on the highlights of this particular piece of legislation, let us go back to the significance of this kind of work and take the success of this particular initiative and apply it to the broader range of government legislation and bureaucracy that is out there.
As I said, bureaucracies have a tendency to grow. Why is that? It is largely due to their reward structure. In a bureaucracy the way one gets ahead personally is to build the bureaucracy underneath oneself. Always spend all your budget plus a little bit more. Launch new ideas and try to win support for your ideas. Get more people motivated around your good idea with very little accountability to what is actually being provided in the way of service and the value of that service evaluated through an impartial third party.
This particular piece of legislation goes counter to that kind of bureaucratic tendency in that it serves to shrink the bureaucracy and add efficiency. Those who are involved in this type of work are usually within bureaucracies and their efforts go unrewarded.
I would like to suggest that the Reform Party from the very inception recognized this tendency within bureaucracies to grow and grow. Within our policy and platform books it is clear that we have called for a simplification of the regulation, a rationalization of the redundancies of the processes within government, adding to the efficiency and quality of the service provided by government but doing it in a way that downsizes the extent of the bureaucracy.
Reform has recognized the need for this type of initiative from the very inception. In fact within our policy documents it is clear that we have also recognized the need for a change in the reward structure around bureaucracies.
What we are calling for within our government is a recognition for those people and those individuals who can demonstrably deliver a higher quality of service at lower cost. These kinds of efficiency gains are usually brought about by individuals within the government at the front line or at the first level of management who are aware of the waste and aware of where the problems are.
The problem today is if those people do take the initiative to increase efficiency, they are not rewarded. In fact they can even encounter some very significant resistance. Our policy calls on that type of initiative to be rewarded. If we are to really see the bureaucracies in our government begin to shrink and become more effective, we need to recognize individuals and groups of people who are focused on providing a higher quality of service at a lower cost to Canadians.
I would like to commend the individuals who were involved in this project. They consulted with industry. I am sure there were many hours spent poring over this piece of legislation to come up with something that is refreshing and is counter to the usual growth we see in the bureaucracy.
With those comments, I would like to say that this is the kind of legislation that is a step in the right direction. It is consistent with what Reform has been calling for. Would it not be refreshing to apply this kind of approach to other pieces of government legislation, perhaps the Income Tax Act.
Many people do not realize that the Income Tax Act was implemented as a temporary measure to fund the war effort. It was actually 36 pages at that time. Now it is over 600 pages of legalese and another 700 pages of special interpretations and guidelines. It is almost twice as thick as the yellow pages in my own home city of Calgary. And Canadians are supposed to somehow figure all of it out.
I believe we need to apply the same kind of rationalization and simplification that we are seeing in this bill to a number of areas within our government. That is why this bill is so significant for what it represents here today.
The Reform caucus and I believe all my colleagues are in support of this bill. Therefore it can be anticipated that there is support from this side of the House on this bill this morning.