Mr. Speaker, I rise to address the motion of the Bloc Quebecois, which reads:
That this House condemn the government for blatant unfairness to Quebec in the matter of the GST—
The official opposition opposes the motion because this is a motion which only speaks to one province. What Canadians need generally is tax relief. Not for one province but for all ten provinces. Not for some Canadians but for all Canadians. We oppose special tax deals which try to create special privileges for people based on this kind of politics.
What we really oppose most of all is the kind of tax record the government has foisted upon Canadians over the past several years. It is a tax record which has resulted in stagnant economic growth, declining family income and record high levels of unemployment. I said it before and I will say it again, we are now in our 86th month straight of over 9% unemployment, or is it the 87th month. I have lost track. I have lost track after seven years of record high unemployment, the longest period of unemployment since the great depression.
I am 29. Even before I got my first real job unemployment was over 9%. My entire professional life, I and people of my age have known nothing but record high levels of unemployment. What about youth unemployment for my generation, when it reaches levels of 25% in some regions of this country, including some parts of the province of Quebec. It is 17% overall.
The government's tax record is record taxes. I would like to point out that the government promised not to raise a penny in taxes before it was elected in 1993. I remember because at the time I was involved with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a group of grassroots taxpayers. The group was a little bit skeptical when these Liberals came calling in October 1993 and promised after their brilliant fiscal record of the Trudeau years not to raise taxes and not to increase the debt.
We were a little skeptical. We asked the Prime Minister, as did Canadians, would the first red book involve any tax increases given the manifold promises included in it. The Prime Minister said no, there were no tax increases in this plan, except there might be a war and in the case of a war, they might have to raise taxes.
Well there was a war, it was a war on Canadian taxpayers. The government decided to raise those taxes 36 times. It decided to piggyback on the most nefarious tax grab of all, the Mulroney deindexation of the income tax brackets, something that sucks $3 billion a year out of the pockets of average Canadians. Most shamefully of all, these Liberals, the government which applauds itself as a paragon of integrity, promised, made a solemn commitment to Canadians that it would scrap, kill, abolish, eliminate, get rid of, trash the GST. Well the last time I checked, the GST was still there. Canadians are still paying it as much or more than ever. That I think is the mother of all political lies, of all political mistruths ever uttered by a politician. The government should hang its head in shame.
Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Portage—Lisgar in a few moments.
It is interesting that the government still claims to be in favour of the GST when recently a number of focus groups were conducted by one of the Liberal government's favourite hack polling firms. It got a bunch of Canadians together behind closed doors and asked them a bunch of questions about the GST. The government was trying to find a way out of the impossible position it found itself in by defending the Mulroney GST.
Those Canadians in those focus groups said they thought the GST was an atrocity. They thought it ought to be abolished. They said that there was no way they would let the government out of that commitment, the promise it made in the 1993 election.
What happened? The government filed the focus group tests away in some filing cabinet in the back of the finance minister's office until some enterprising taxpayer decided to find out what kind of information about the GST was being generated at the expense of taxpayers. What did the finance minister have to say when this access to information request was made to release the results of these polls and focus groups? He said that no, Canadians will not be allowed access to what they said about the GST at their expense. Not only did the Liberals lie about the GST promise, they would not even let Canadians see what Canadians advised the government to do because they knew how humiliated they would be if the facts came out.
My question to my hon. friends opposite is, what are they afraid of? Why do they not want to let Canadians see what those focus groups said? What are they trying to hide?
It is really shocking. The one thing this government still has not learned is that Canadians want to keep more of what they earn. The Liberal Party has always believed that tax dollars are moneys that the government somehow has a proprietary claim on. We in the Reform Party believe that the money people earn belongs first, foremost and finally to them and their families so that they can support themselves and their businesses and help the economy to grow.
Increasingly Canadians are beginning to realize that the top economic priority for this country is tax relief. The government said that 50% of any future surpluses would go to new spending. It did not think that a party such as ours would be able to demonstrate public support for tax relief. The government thinks people are greedy because they want to keep a little bit more of their earnings, because middle class families want to be able to take a vacation every now and then on the money they earn. The government thinks that is greedy.
The government assumes that Canadians would be opposed to tax relief. But lo and behold, this past weekend a poll came out. Fortunately it was a public poll, one not commissioned by the government or we would not have seen it. This polls shows us that the number of Canadians who want tax relief now has tripled in the last couple of months. Now 35% of Canadians are demanding immediate tax relief. Only 9% want to spend any of the surplus as opposed to the government's priority to spend only half the surplus on useless programs and bureaucracies.
The priorities of Canadians are becoming increasingly evident. Canadians are calling for tax relief. They are calling for integrity in government. They are calling for the promise on the GST to be kept. My challenge to members opposite is to do what is right for a change. Cut spending, balance the budget so that we can scrap the GST and maybe they can salvage a little patina of their now much tarnished political credibility.
