Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this group of amendments to Bill C-70, the so-called harmonization bill.
Those who have been listening to the debate over the last couple of days will know that this bill will not lead to harmonization at all. It will mean that three provinces will live under a completely different set of rules than the rest of the country. Part of the reason for that is that the other provinces do not think it is the right thing to do and will not give the federal government their approval. We have anything but harmonization. What we have is more disunity and more divisiveness in the country as a result of this legislation.
Any amount of amendment to the bill will not fix it. The fact is that the bill will not make things better. It will not harmonize the tax across the country, it will lead to a split. It will not fulfil the
Liberal promise to get rid of the GST. Those who have been listening to the debate over the last few days will know that.
Leading up to the last election campaign, during the election campaign and since the election, many Liberal MPs and the Prime Minister have very clearly promised to abolish, kill, scrap the GST. There is no doubt about that.
This harmonization bill is not a well thought out piece of legislation. It is a smoke screen so the Liberals can say on the campaign trail that they kept their promise to scrap the GST, but it will not sell. Those 10, 20, 30 or 40 Liberal MPs who were elected on the promise of getting rid of the GST are in danger of losing their seats on that one issue alone. No amount of amendment and certainly not the amendments in this group will solve the problem.
I want to speak to these amendments and to the so-called harmonization of the GST from another point of view. As the Reform Party critic for interprovincial trade, I want to deal with that issue and explain how this legislation clearly violates the government's agreement on internal trade. That agreement does not allow legislation such as this to apply to one part of the country and not another. This bill clearly violates the agreement. I will speak to the bill from that point of view.
Some people may not be surprised that this piece of legislation or one piece of legislation would clearly contradict legislation that was presented earlier by this government, but that does not mean it is right.
I suppose I should not be surprised that the government would break its own law, a law it has put in place, the agreement on internal trade, through the introduction of another piece of legislation. That is what it has done. I should not be surprised but I do not accept it. Many other Canadians do not accept it. Canadians expect government to honour the laws it puts in place just as they expect everyone to honour the laws that are put in place. This legislation clearly violates the government's own law.
The agreement on internal trade is falling apart. The agreement was put in place after the negotiations between the provinces and the federal government throughout 1994. After it was signed in 1995, I thought the government had made some progress on this issue. It had reached an agreement in some areas on removing barriers to interprovincial trade. In other areas it set a framework and a timeframe for removing further barriers to internal trade and the provinces had agreed in principle to removing the barriers to internal trade. I thought progress had been made.
Unfortunately very little progress has been proven over time. The set deadlines have been broken one after another to the point that British Columbia is saying that it will not even take part in the negotiations on the so-called MUSH sector, the sector that deals with procurement for municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals. British Columbia announced earlier this week that it will not even take part in negotiations to try to finish this agreement.
Deadlines have passed. The agreement never had a mechanism to ensure that the provinces and the federal government would abide by the rules of the agreement. With the formula for approving changes to the agreement, being unanimous consent, it was clear from the start that it would be very difficult to complete the agreement. And that has proven to be the case.
There are several reasons this is such an important issue, why it is so important to Canadians that these barriers to interprovincial trade be removed. First, according to the Fraser Institute, it costs the average Canadian family $3,500 a year just having these barriers to trade in place. We have a situation in Canada where it is actually more difficult for a company based in one province to do business the other provinces than it is for a company in the United States to do business with all Canadian provinces.
The barriers have created an incentive for Canadian companies to relocate into the United States so they can have open access to all Canadian provinces. This drives jobs out of the country. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce stated in a report before Christmas that just reducing internal trade barriers or increasing internal trade by 10 per cent will create 200,000 jobs in this country. That is a lot of jobs.
For a government that was elected on the promise to get rid of the GST and partly on the promise to create jobs, you would think it would be enticing to make relatively simple changes compared to some of the other changes that would have to be made to create jobs. Just increasing trade between provinces by 10 per cent would create 200,000 jobs, but the government does not seem committed to this idea.
Now with British Columbia saying that it will not even negotiate, we are left to ask whether this 1995 agreement, which I said at the time was real progress, is really going to accomplish a thing.
We have a problem that needs to be dealt with with urgency. This harmonization bill and these amendments we are debating in this House are not going to solve a problem. They are not good for business in Atlantic Canada. They are not good for the people of Atlantic Canada, as jobs will be lost because of this deal. Many businesses involved have stated this clearly.
There is a further aspect to this agreement on internal trade and the importance of the trade between provinces that has not been talked about very much. We have put the Canadian economy at risk, a risk we have put in place unnecessarily by coming to depend more and more on international trade before we have done the work
to encourage trade between provinces and to make it easier for businesses to trade between provinces. There is an increased risk.
If we have a substantial increase in our dollar we are going to have a dramatic reduction in trade and this government and this country have come to depend on trade for jobs. Any new jobs that have been created have been pretty much due to international trade. We have an increase in the dollar, our trade surplus has decreased, which happened in the third quarter of last year. Our economy goes in the tank, unemployment increases. That is why it is so important to deal with this issue.
I will certainly continue on this topic relating it to the debate in future groups of amendments.