Madam Speaker, it is really tough to follow that stand up comedy act by the member for Winnipeg South but I will try to do my best.
It is absolutely incredible. The Liberals have it down to an art how to communicate that they are wonderful when in fact they are doing exactly the opposite. They say “We are the defenders of health care”, and at the same time they cut and burn and slash the transfers to provinces.
It is a simple strategy. I have to congratulate them. If we were fighting a war, they would be on my team because they know how to win a war by making everybody else take the hits. Their own soldiers stand up and don't get touched at all because they are somehow able to communicate that misinformation by saying “We are not responsible, it was not us. We cut $7 billion out of health care and transfers to the provinces for education and welfare. We cut that but no, it was not us”.
The provincial governments landed up taking the heat for it. Then the Liberals have the gall to stand up in this House and criticize governments like the Harris government in Ontario because of the cuts to health care and education that government has found it necessary to make as a result of the fact that the funds from the federal government have been drastically cut. Now gingerly a little bit is being put back in.
Somehow the Liberals have the ability to spin it in such a way that the Canadian people do not look to the real depth of the message. They buy into it and say “Let us send those Liberals back to Ottawa. They really know how to manage the economy”.
Let us look at the facts. This government claims to be so wonderful and talks about having brought the deficit under control. That is only one part. I will put it this way, it is one leg of a four-legged stool. The stool is tottering but they finally got that one leg and I will gingerly applaud them for that.
I am glad the Liberals are borrowing less than the Conservatives were borrowing. Had we still been borrowing at $42 billion per year, our fiscal picture would be much more bleak than it is now. Yes, they have slowed down the rate of borrowing to the pace where they are now borrowing only about $9 billion a year instead of $40 billion a year. While these Liberals have been in power since 1993 our debt has gone up.
I started this political thing. I was one of those people who was not involved in politics at all. I never belonged to a political party until I joined Reform. But I got so cotton-picking upset about the mismanagement of the Government of Canada since Trudeau took power way back, spending more money than we were taking in, adding to the debt and transferring the taxpayers' hard earned dollars not into programs that were needed by Canadians but to lending institutions because of the debt and the interest payments on them.
I got involved. I remember when I first started. It was in the fall of 1991. When I was first thinking of running as a candidate I gave a speech and said that it was deplorable that our debt was $420 billion. The Conservatives took it from the $320 billion which the previous Liberals had left them to $420 billion. In nine years they added $100 billion to the debt.
The fact is that this government since 1993, in four and a half years, has added almost $100 billion to the debt. The Liberals are twice as good as the Conservatives. While they stand up and say that they are wonderful, that they are not borrowing so much, the fact of the matter is that still, because of the accumulated debt and the large interest payments, the Government of Canada, on behalf of the hard working taxpayer of this country, has driven us into debt $100 billion in round figures more than when the Liberals took office in 1993. And like I said, they have the gall to stand up in front of Canadians and say “Vote for us again because we are wonderful, we are really solving this problem”. I find that unconscionable.
I am going to say something else about this whole system. We are talking today about a tax bill. What are taxes? In the olden days as we used to say, it was a king or a lord who had power over the subjects in his little kingdom. He could say “For me to have my castle, my gold and to run my armies and so on, you will each pay a certain portion of what you earned, a certain part of your crops, or whatever”. They gave it as a law.
It was a bit of a symbiotic relationship. Those subjects benefited from the protection of the king or the lord. The armies were really there to protect the king's or the lord's investment in those people since they were the source of his wealth.
In a democracy taxes are really a contribution made by hard working, risk-taking workers and entrepreneurs. They are saying that they will pay into a public purse the amount required to run their governments. The taxes in this country are killing families and poor people. It is incredible. The Liberal government says over and over that it is wonderful and cares for the poor people. There are people who make $18,000 or $20,000 a year, some of whom are single moms, and they still have a tax bill to pay.
During the last Parliament there was a big controversy over who should pay the taxes on the child support paid by a supporting spouse to a custodial parent. This government had the gall again to increase the taxes when it said that the person paying the money will pay the taxes instead of transferring the taxes to the spouse.
The government could have had the person pay a deduction in advance which the lower paying taxpayer could get back in the case of an overpayment. Instead the government said no, that it would just do it. The government ended up taking millions of dollars away from the poorest in our society. Yet they stand up and say “We are the Liberals who look after the needs of the needy in this country”. Pardon me for being sarcastic but the truth and what the message is are on opposite sides of the spectrum.
I will be so bold as to suggest that taxation in this country has become a form of legalized theft. If someone came into my house and took half of everything I had in my house, including the left speaker of my stereo system which is worth $20 and my old black and white television, I would phone the RCMP and ask them to get there tout de suite to arrest the guy who was taking half of my stuff. Yet I allow the federal, provincial and municipal governments to take from me by the coercion of taxation, which I call a form of theft, 50% of my earnings every year. If I do not co-operate with the system I am told by government bigwigs that I am not a good citizen. Why should I?
I am certainly willing to help those in need, absolutely. I do it voluntarily. On a number of occasions I have come across people with needs. Whenever I am able to with my after tax dollars I love to help people. But for me to send it to Ottawa, have this government twirl it around in its centrifuge, have 70% of the money I have contributed spill over in government waste and inefficiency, have some of it doled out to its political friends, and if there is some left over it may go to the poor, I am not content with that. That is theft and it is wrong.
This is what I would like to see in a taxation system. We should fix the tax system so Canadians get to keep some of their hard earned money and use it the way they see fit, which includes helping their neighbours and others who need help.
It is absolutely absurd the way this and other governments impose tax upon tax upon tax. We get taxed with income tax and we pay our municipal taxes with the money left over. My municipal tax bill is around $2,500 a year and I have to earn $4,000 to pay it because the federal and provincial governments first take 35% or 40%. With the money I have left I write a cheque to my municipality and my $4,000 is gone. It goes on and on and on.
This government can tinker with taxes, like it is doing with this bill, for decades. We will never rest until it starts lowering taxes, making the tax system fair and making it less onerous.