I am not sure what that comment was, but I am not making fun of anybody. I am stating a fact about two pieces of aboriginal legislation before the House.
The other bill before the House that has the same balkanization trend is the First Nations Land Act. Once again, it is national legislation from a national government that will deal with 14 bands only.
What do we do the next time there are 12 or 14 bands that want something different? We have over 600 bands in the country. Are we going to have 35 pieces of legislation to deal with all of them? This is a very worrisome trend.
We have had a whole set of negotiations in this country dealing with an attempt to get rid of interprovincial trade barriers. In my view this BST bill is actually contributing to interprovincial trade barriers. It is adding to the cost of businesses in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland in doing business with other provinces. Why we would want to go in this direction is absolutely beyond me. There is only one overriding reason, and we know what it is. The government got in trouble, it got hung on its own statements and in order to extricate itself it entered into this special agreement. Why else did the government have to come up with $1 billion to encourage people in those three provinces to participate?
The three provinces which are the net contributors to equalization in the country are B.C., Alberta and Ontario. Those three provinces do not want to have anything to do with this proposal. That is interesting.
The minister of finance for the province of Ontario has said that this way of arranging things would cost the province $3 billion in extra taxes. It is comforting to see that there is someone who cannot be bought.
There is a circumstance in the bill which would force federally regulated industries like the airlines and the banks to bury GST in their pricing across the country. I find that most interesting with the current transparency of taxation.
I have relatives who live in the United States. They have looked at ticketing from the United States through Canadian airspace to Canadian destinations. Travel agents in the U.S. are absolutely horrified at the level of taxation in Canadian air travel as compared to U.S. air travel. At least they know it is taxation which is creating the pricing. With this kind of provision no one will know. Is that not wonderful for the government's agenda of out of sight, out of mind?
There is another parallel. If they cannot blend it, then maybe they can obfuscate it. We can always see in the actions of this government where it is trying to maintain federal leverage but it wants to obfuscate how it achieves the leverage because it wants to do it at minimum cost. We have seen that in the blending of the transfers to the provinces for health, education and welfare during the term of this government. They were rolled into one transfer. It is much harder to delineate what is going where. Then the $18 billion transfer was reduced by $7 billion, but it cannot be tracked because it has a new name and it is blended. That is quite a parallel.
We have the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance and scores of Liberal cabinet and caucus members who all made election pledges to eliminate and not blend the GST. We have a Deputy Prime Minister who said on this issue: "A promise made by a politician seeking election is not really a promise". Is that not wonderful?