Mr. Speaker, today we are debating Bill C-70, the harmonized sales tax bill or, as many have called it, the blended sales tax bill. I gather that is what the Liberals were going to call it, but shortened down it became the BS tax as opposed to the harmonized sales tax. I believe the term BS tax came a little close to the truth, so the Liberals decided to call it the harmonized tax instead. However, the BS tax is how Atlantic Canadians and many other Canadians are beginning to view this tax.
I would like to examine where this tax came from. It came from the GST. The government lacked the ability to deal with and deliver on its GST promise. The GST is the most hated tax the country has ever seen.
The Mulroney government pushed through the GST. We can recall the days when the Conservatives dragged forward an obscure part of the Constitution in order to stack the Senate to get the GST through. What about all the Liberal senators? What did the Liberal senators do at that time? They screamed that the bill proposing the GST was horrible and had to be axed.
It will be most interesting to see what those same Liberal senators do when the HST goes to the Senate. It is a very similar tax in that it is hated. I hope the Liberal senators will examine the HST and deal with the terrible parts of the bill, parts which Atlantic Canadians are saying will not fly.
What happened to the Mulroney government over the GST? It went from being a majority government to a party which can hold a caucus in the front seat of an imported pick-up truck. That is what happens to a government which does not listen to the people.
The Liberals promised to kill, abolish, eliminate the GST, not blend it. They promised to get rid of it. The Prime Minister said it on television, as well as the Deputy Prime Minister and the finance minister. They are all on tape and on film saying that is what they would do. Where are we today? We are dealing with the HST, the BS tax, and trying to fulfil a Liberal promise and what is it going to do?
It establishes a 15 per cent tax in the Atlantic provinces. To some of the Atlantic provinces this is just fine because they take the 7 per cent general sales tax and the federal tax and add that to the provincial tax. In most cases in the Atlantic provinces it is over 15 per cent, so this is a deal. This is a deal because Atlantic Canadians can now say this is a lower tax than they would be paying originally. In some cases it was 17 or 18 per cent, so they dropped it to 15 per cent. This is just fine. The administration of it is a horrendous nightmare, but from a political point of view this was just fine and the Atlantic premiers bought into it.
However, there is a loss in revenue. Where is this revenue going to come from? Naturally it comes from the rest of Canada. Alberta will not buy into it. B.C. will not buy into it. Ontario will not buy into it. They have categorically said there was no way that these provinces were going to buy into a blended sales tax. If we look at Alberta, that is the classic example. It does not have a provincial sales tax but it has the 7 per cent GST. Why in the world would it possibly settle for a 15 per cent tax? It would be ludicrous. B.C. is the same and Ontario is the same, only to a lesser degree. It is absolutely a no sell for the rest of the country.
The Ontario finance minister has said "just blending in Ontario would cost the province of Ontario $3 billion". That is the type of lunacy that we are talking about in this bill to try to sell it to the rest of the country.
What does this do? It is a transfer of wealth. It is a transfer of money from the rest of Canada into Atlantic Canada. If this were for a good reason nobody would complain. However, the ludicrous reason we have here is it is a political sell-off to Atlantic Canada. It is the way the Liberals are trying to say this is the way they will solve the problem. Again, here they go manipulating Canadians.
Besides transferring this wealth around, the administration is a nightmare. All the businesses and consumers are up in arms saying good lord, this will not work. Where are the Liberals? We have about 28 Liberals from the Atlantic provinces but they would not even allow open hearings with Atlantic Canadians. They are saying "you cannot do that, why would we want to have people in front of us telling us what might be wrong with this bill?"
This is the type of legislation that the Liberals are forcing through that is simply not going to fly.
However, there is a bigger picture. This bill deals with what this government has or has not dealt with and where it is not going. The bigger issue is integrity. Where is the integrity of a Prime Minister who, on national television, said one thing about a tax and then said "I didn't say that", when in fact he lied to Canadians? He is just saying that the integrity of the whole government is okay. It is not okay. What about trust? Canadians want to trust their politicians. They want to be able to trust their politicians. This is just another example of Liberal lunacy.
What about truth? What about representing constituents? What about those Liberals MPs who are out on the east coast? They do not represent their constituents. We are going into an election that is going to be very much about the integrity of politicians representing their constituents. When they go to their federal ridings representing the issues and the people who sent them there, obviously the members from Atlantic Canada who are in this place are not representing their people. What is more, they refuse to listen to those constituents to tell them what is wrong with this bill.
In summary, I would say that this bill will not fly. There are huge holes in it. It is a transfer of wealth. It is about the integrity or lack of integrity of this government and the leaders of this government. I believe that the very short part of the deal is that Canadians are going to go to polls and say that this is not what they want in the form of a government. They want integrity, truth and representation. That is what we are going to see when we go to the polls shortly.