Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise again to speak on Bill C-70, the harmonized sales tax, the HST or, as a friend of mine, Mr. Mike Jenkinson from the Alberta Report referred to it, the helter-skelter tax. I thought the name that he applied to it was quite appropriate in so far as we have rules that apply to eastern Canada we have different rules that apply to western Canada and we have the Minister of Finance trying to bring Ontario on side. We have, more or less, harmonization with the GST in the province of Quebec. Right across the country it appears that there are different rules in different places. Therefore the helter-skelter tax perhaps is not that inappropriate.
I want to again focus on the concept of the Liberal Party which is tax and spend at all costs. If there is an opportunity to raise taxes, it will leave no stone unturned in order to find that extra dollar which it is always looking for in order that it can develop a new program to give to Canadians in order to buy their votes. When I say give to Canadians, it seems that the government always wants to break society into its different classifications.
I happened to see in the Globe and Mail today an article regarding youth jobs plan and some side steps training, how they are moving their focus away from training to a youth jobs plan and how they are perhaps going to focus several hundred million dollars into this program.
Youth training and youth jobs are vitally important. We have here the tax and spend philosophy of the Liberal government which taxes Canadians right across the board, the GST in this case, and harmonize sales tax in Atlantic Canada. Collect all these taxes and try to provide jobs for youth and job training for youth.
I cannot speak for my friends in the Bloc who introduced some tax increase concepts yesterday, but we in the Reform Party would like to point out clearly and definitively that if we can reduce taxation, especially for employers, it is surely better than the tax and spend philosophy of a government that takes it from employers and gives it back to a few.
We heard at the last election about the jobs, jobs strategy of the federal government where it was going to spend $6 billion to renew our infrastructure. We all know how much actually went into infrastructure renewal, not an awful lot. But that is another issue.
The point we are trying to make is that while the Liberals made a great issue of spending $6 billion to revitalize the economy and restart the economy to create jobs, we have heard nothing about the deliberate policy of the Minister of Finance of maintaining employment insurance premiums far higher than we need in order to cover the cost of payouts. He has therefore built up a surplus of $5 billion, all paid for by employers and employees. It is a payroll tax that the Minister of Finance has siphoned out of the business community in the last two years and therefore has recovered every penny of his $6 billion tax and spend program which did very little to create jobs in the first place.
The myth I want to point out is that tax and spend programs do not work and tax and spend programs allow the Minister of Finance to hide these payroll taxes that are inequitable and damaging to the economy. They destroy jobs but yet provide the federal government with the excuse to come up with a youth jobs plan to put this money back into the economy. Surely it makes imminent sense to leave the money in the hands of the employers in the first instance who can decide where best that money is to be spent.
I think of the state of the union address by the President of the United States the other day. He challenged every employer in the country to create one new position; through their own efforts to build a business and create another job. That I think is a wonderful
challenge. Too bad the Minister of Finance did not think about it. Too bad the Liberals did not think about it. They are totally focused on taxing more money out of employers in order for them to come up with what they consider to be vote buying programs as they spend it back in the economy. There is a fundamental difference.
Let us look at this helter-skelter tax and at some of the rules they are going to ask business to administer. Do not tell me that they are not going to have extra costs. What about travel agents? I live in Alberta and I travel across the country as part of my position as a member of Parliament. Let us say I buy a ticket from Edmonton to Halifax. The travel agent has to charge me only the GST because the province of Alberta has no provincial sales tax, the only fortunate province in the country that gets by without one. If I ask the same travel agent in Alberta to provide me with a ticket from Halifax to Ottawa, the travel agent in Alberta has to charge the harmonized sales tax.
How is a travel agent supposed to accommodate that complexity of rules? As far as tickets are concerned the GST or the HST will apply based on the point of departure, not on the point of purchase.
The same applies to trucking and shipping goods across the country. Therefore who is going to set up a warehouse distribution system in Atlantic Canada where every shipment out of a warehouse will have a harmonized sales tax of 15 per cent when they can locate that warehouse in a different province and pay a lower GST and provincial sales tax?
These are job killing programs and the government comes out with this vote buying program such as job plans which is in the Globe and Mail today. That is an inequity on the taxation side. It is an inequity on the government spending side. That is why we say surely it makes a lot more sense to leave the money in the hands of the employer and give him the challenge of creating another job.
We hear about discrimination at every turn. We hear about discrimination about older people who find it so dreadfully difficult to get back into the workforce. Right now it is more appealing for this government to focus on the youth and it ignores the older people who want to return to the workforce.
I can expect on February 18 we are going to see some kind of program focused at them as well when surely it would have been so much better had the government lived up to its first election promise to axe, scrap and abolish the entire thing.