Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak on Bill C-70 which harmonizes the sales taxes in the maritimes.
The object of the bill is an attempt to create jobs, to simplify the tax system and to stimulate the economy. This attempt by the government to harmonize the sales tax will do exactly the opposite. It is an example of an ill-advised taxation initiative which will put people out of work, increase the underground economy, drive companies into bankruptcy. Let me give some examples.
The business community has cried out against the present form of this tax. The Retail Council of Canada said that it will cost retailers at least $100 million per year. It will not only cost the retailers, obviously it will cost those who pay for it in the end, the taxpayers. The Halifax Chamber of Commerce said that the sales tax will push up the cost of new houses by 5.5 per cent. This is in an area of the country where people are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase homes.
Consumers are going to pay more for children's clothing, books, gasoline, heating fuel: the essentials. In fact, it will hurt those who are least able to afford it. The government should be embarrassed about doing that to the people of Atlantic Canada.
The intent, though, is sensible. Having a harmonized sales tax is actually a good thing but it has to occur in a different number of ways. It has to be one tax for the entire country applied across the board. The rate has to be lower than what it is now. We need one auditing procedure and it has to be simpler and easier to understand. It has to have one single remittance and one set of rules.
The system that is proposed by the government does not do that at all. It just increases the complexity. Furthermore, it asks Canadians outside the provinces in the maritimes to fund this project by shunting money from the west to the maritimes. For the moment, the west does not mind providing for provinces that are less able to afford things. However, to ingrain this harmonized sales is doing a disservice to all Canadians. This tax will affect over 50 per cent of businesses in the maritimes in a massively negative way. This is information from the business community in the maritimes.
There are ways to get around this. There are ways to provide a sales tax that will be better and therefore stimulate the economy. There are ways to get people back to work but the government has just nibbled around the edges for the last three years that we have been here. It has done very little to help the 10 per cent of Canadians who are unemployed and the nearly 20 per cent of Canadians who are under employed.
Here are a few constructive suggestions that I challenge the government to take up. First, the debt and the deficit. Get the deficit down to zero and decrease the debt. Second, instead of having the HST that the government is proposing, let us have a sensible harmonized sales tax that has one tax, a lower rate applicable across the country, that is simpler, with one reporting procedure per year, one auditing procedure that is easier to understand.
Better, of course, would be to scrap the tax altogether. A few years ago when the government of the day decided to lower taxes, what happened? More money came into the government coffers, more money was in the pockets of Canadians and the economy was stimulated. What did that government do? The Conservative government of the day started to tax wildly. That did the exact opposite of stimulating the economy and revenues to the public purse went down.
We need to flatten the tax system. My colleagues in the Reform Party have proposed some sensible solutions for flattening the tax procedure for all Canadians. It is a simple tax that does not defeat the intent of working harder to earn more for ourselves and our families. It provides for a greater minimum exclusion for those in the lower socioeconomic groups so those who are poor in our society pay little or no tax at all. It is a win-win situation.
Interprovincial trade barriers have to go. I do not know if the Canadian public realizes it but there are more barriers to trade east-west across our country than there are north-south. That is an embarrassment. The government has had opportunity after opportunity to deal with this but it has not.
We have serious problems in education in our country. There is a dislocation between the needs of the private sector and the initiatives of the education system. If we want to build a stronger Canada, if we want to build a nation where we can compete with countries from around the world, if we want to become one of the new tigers in the economy of the Asia-Pacific countries, then we have to invest in education.
We have to determine what will be the needs of the private sector in the 21st century. We have develop co-operative initiatives between the education system and the private sector to enable the students of today and tomorrow to develop the skills that will enable them to become employable in the future. That is not happening right now. I challenge the government to work with their provincial counterparts to do just that.
Number four is skills training. It is an embarrassment to us that we are one of the nations of the world with the lowest investment in skills and labour training in the developing world. How can we be competitive in the global economy if we do not invest in skills and labour training for our workers? That is absolutely essential if we are going to compete in the future.
We also need to reinvest in research and technology. The government is pulling money out of research and technology. It is doing the same thing with education. The government ripped some $7 billion from transfer payments for education, health and welfare and claimed it was balancing the budget. All the government is doing is balancing its budget on the backs of taxpayers. At the end of the day it is the taxpayer who pays for everything.
We have to capitalize on foreign markets. We heard that we should be reinvesting in north-south trade. Thirty years ago trade in Asia represented 5 per cent of the world's gross national product. Today it is 30 per cent and growing. We are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this in my province of British Columbia. We have the geography, we have the people, we have the opportunity for skills development, not only for points east in Asia-Pacific but also as a conduit and as a channel for points in Europe and points south. Very few nations, in fact no nation, can boast the ideal position that we have today.
I challenge the people of Canada to realize that our system of governance today is not a democracy at all. It operates more like a fiefdom. Democracy has very little to do with what takes place within our nation today. In fact, most of the important decisions made are made by a group of non-elected, unaccountable officials that the public never sees. That is where the legislative initiatives occur. They are made not to make this country a better place, but purely for the maintenance and acquisition of power.
If the Canadian public wants to see radical, fundamental, positive social and economic change, then they will have to get angry and put pressure on all of their elected officials to demand the changes in governance that we will require if we are going to be an aggressive player in the economy of the 21st century.
We also need strong leadership that demonstrates and expresses a vision of the country that is going to lead us into the 21st century where we will be able to demonstrate strength and compassion. Right now, that does not occur.
We need to build a nation where all able-bodied individuals can develop the skills training they require. And it is an obligation for all able-bodied individuals to capitalize on those opportunities. We also need to fulfil our obligation to those individuals who cannot take care of themselves and ensure that our social programs are placed on a sustainable footing.
If we can see that leadership in this nation, we will be able to lead our people into a stronger and brighter future in the 21st century. Failure to do that will mean terrible social and economic consequences in the future and we will only be a shadow of what we can be in Canada.