Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-70 today. We are talking about an act to amend the Excise Tax Act, the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, the Income Tax Act, the Debt Servicing and Reduction Account Act and related acts. Among all that verbiage comes the GST and the blended sales tax.
While I am doing walking tours in my constituency, whether it is in Leduc, Ponoka, Wetaskiwin, Lacombe, Bentley or elsewhere, I ask the shop owners and the people in their employ what is their biggest problem or what it is they would like to discuss. I tell them they have their MP before them. It is an opportunity for them to tell me what it is they like about the way the country is run or more likely, what it is they do not like about the way the country is run.
The most often mentioned thing about how they do not like the way the country is run has to do with the GST. The GST makes reluctant tax collectors out of shop owners, business people, people who have concerns about paying their staff, about paying for their lights and their heating. People have concerns about keeping their shop open, keeping their staff on payroll and making a living for themselves and their families.
Not only do they become reluctant tax collectors, but if for some unknown reason they do not follow the collection of the tax or the filing of the papers to the exact degree the bureaucrats insist on, then they are subjected to all sorts of harassment, penalties, interest and audits. An army of people rain down around their necks and tell them that this voluntary job, this job they took on under great duress, is not being done properly and if they do not do it properly they can face all sorts of penalties and interest charges.
More specifically we should be talking about the blended sales tax or the harmonized sales tax, the BST or the HST. Those acronyms conjure up some great possibilities, but I guess I will not allow myself to go in that particular direction at the moment.
One of the things that is particularly grating to general members of society in the province of Alberta is that even though we do not have a provincial sales tax, we are now compelled to pay a sort of surreptitious provincial sales tax in order to help fund this $1 billion fund. This $1 billion fund has been called all kinds of things. I know that Mr. Speaker has advised us to be very judicious in our choice of words, so I have chosen the term persuasion fund, which I hope will pass the parliamentary committee.
Residents of Alberta are going to have to pay into this $1 billion persuasion fund whether they like it or not. Residents of Alberta are quite proud of the fact that they do not have to pay a provincial sales tax. Now of course it looks as though they do.
When the GST came about, we all remember the events which led up to the imposition of the GST. It was first talked about as having to be a 9 per cent tax. I remember very well. I was on county council in those days and we all agreed that if we had to pay some kind of a consumption tax in order to ever see our way clear of this deficit and debt that we would wind up having to pay for, that yes we could see ourselves paying some kind of a tax, provided that all of the revenues from that tax went toward debt reduction and deficit reduction.
As a matter of fact we even went so far as to say-and this was just brainstorming, it was nothing official or in the minutes of the meetings-we were talking among ourselves. We decided that if the government of the day were to say there would be no exemptions, there would be no kickbacks, there would be no partial exemptions-well, kickbacks perhaps, partial exemptions shall I say.
I will use the municipalities in Alberta as an example. They were exempt for I believe it was 57 per cent of the GST. I believe that is the correct amount. That necessitated the employees of the county of Ponoka to fill out a GST form to apply for this rebate on goods that they bought. They paid the full 7 per cent up front and then they were allowed to recover I believe it was 57 per cent of that by remitting the form.
We said that it was too complicated. Immediately we could see that it was going to require extra bureaucracy and extra help in order to figure out who was eligible and who was going to get the rebate and who was going to pay the full shot and so on.
We said that if it was something that was going to go straight toward the debt to reduce the debt and improve our lot in the days and years to come, then we could probably live with it if it was around 3 per cent and was applied to everything: toothpaste, diapers, bread. We said that we could handle that because we could see ourselves working toward a goal.
I believe the thinking of the government of the day was that if it started off at 9 per cent and wound up with 7 per cent, then the people of Canada would say: "Whew, at least it is not 9 per cent", and perhaps they would accept it.
The people of the constituency of Wetaskiwin told their sitting member, who was a government member at the time: "We will not support you. We do not want the GST. If you vote in favour of the GST we will not support you". The member said he heard what they were saying but the government of the day voted in the GST.
During that time the Liberals sat in opposition. There was a great hue and cry against the inequities and the unfairness of the GST. We could see during the election campaign how the Liberals promised to scrap, kill, abolish and otherwise do away with the GST.