Mr. Speaker, I was delighted to hear the comments of the hon. member for Mississauga West.
The member referred to the Hazel McCallion international airport. Perhaps it should be called the Liberal boondoggle international airport after this government has wasted $200 million in the botched Pearson contract buyout. It is something for the member to stand in his place and remind Canadians, like rubbing salt in the wounds, about what a terrible, atrocious job he and this government did in reversing the contract rights of people who had a vested interest in that airport which cost taxpayers over $200 million.
The member spoke as well about the need for the federal government and all levels of government to co-operate with the municipalities. He said why can we all not just get along. We need clear rules and guidelines so the municipalities know exactly what the relationship is with the federal government.
It is very interesting because the member's idea of a co-operative relationship with the municipalities is to pass Bill C-28 without their support, to impose a tax on the businesses owned by municipalities, on their utility companies. That is his idea of a co-operative relationship. That is the government's idea of a co-operative relationship with taxpayers. The federal government says “We will co-operate in taking money out of your wallet”. That is its idea of co-operation. I call it a tax grab.
What the hon. member seeks to do by supporting this bill and opposing our motion is to impose a tax on profitable corporations owned by municipal governments. These are important revenues to many municipalities. Many municipalities rely on the revenues they generate from these corporations. They turn those revenues back into the corporations to reinvest in the utility infrastructures of their cities, towns and villages. Others rely on it to help supplement their general revenues.
Make no mistake about it. If we do not support Motion No. 1 on Bill C-28 we will in effect be deciding to raise property taxes indirectly because there will be less revenues coming into municipal coffers. We will also be putting municipal politicians who have been dealing with downloading from the senior levels of government for the past decade in the very difficult position of trying to decide which areas of their utility infrastructure they can cut back on. That is not good.
We just went through the terrible experience of the ice storm in southern Quebec and eastern Ontario. Tens of thousands of Canadians are still recovering from the terrible consequences of that devastating natural disaster. If we learned one thing it is the need for all levels of government to be absolutely focused and dedicated on maintaining a top rate utility infrastructure that can defeat the attacks made on it by natural disasters like the ice storm. We need municipal utility companies.
It is interesting that on the island of Montreal, I understand that while most of Montreal was blacked out at the height of the ice storm, the municipality of Westmount was still lit up. Why? Because it has its own locally managed and owned utility company with an infrastructure that is so sophisticated it withstood the collapse of the power network.
By imposing a tax on that kind of utility company this government would undermine the ability of municipalities like Westmount to maintain a power infrastructure which can withstand some of the challenges it needs to face. That is one of the reasons we have proposed this motion which would prohibit the imposition of this tax on subsidiary corporations owned by Canadian municipalities.
It is really another back door tax grab. This Liberal government is very artful when it comes to presenting tax increases as mere housekeeping amendments. That is why it claims it has not raised taxes in the past five years since it was elected in 1993. In fact any close study of the books will conclude that the government has raised taxes at least 37 times, not including the most recent federal government budget. It is little amendments like this one which, albeit indirectly and almost invisibly, end up sucking more out of the pockets of local taxpayers.
It is true that there is only one taxpayer. The hon. Minister of Finance has said that on many occasions. If it is true, as politicians repeat it all the time, then why do we not respect that basic truth of political reality? Why does the federal government jemmy around with the rules of taxation of businesses owned by municipalities and in effect impose a higher tax on local taxpayers?
It is not Hazel McCallion or Mel Lastman or Jean Doré or Pierre Bourque; it is not the mayors who own these corporations. It is local taxpayers who own these corporations. They belong to them. By taxing money away from the profitable utility corporations they own we are imposing a tax on them.
This reminds me of a tax change the government made in the last session, a change to the Public Utilities Income Tax Transfer Act, PUITTA, a long, technical name. Precisely for that reason the government thought it could make a significant change to Public Utilities Income Tax Transfer Act that nobody would notice.
Of course Reformers noticed. We opposed this enormous tax grab as vigorously as we could. The government still passed it. It said that privately owned utilities, private sector utilities, would no longer be able to compete on a level playing field with their counterparts in the public sector.
In Alberta, the province I represent, we have a vigorous private sector economy. We believe in something the government does not understand very well called free enterprise. We believe that privately owned, privately managed businesses in the private sector are ten times out of ten more productive and more efficient in servicing consumers than crown corporations. That is why Albertans have maintained an infrastructure of private utilities.
It just so happens that publicly owned utilities like Ontario Hydro and Hydro Quebec do not have to pay income tax or corporate tax on their profits. I do not quarrel with that. Perhaps it is a sensible policy. Until 1996 the federal government provided a rebate to consumers of private utilities because private utilities had to pay those taxes.
In effect this rebate levelled the playing field so that an elderly lady paying for her heating bill in southwest Edmonton would not have to pay the portion that was going into the tax coffers of the federal government. That is what PUITTA did. It helped that woman and millions of other consumers of private utility services. It levelled the playing field so that they were not paying more than their counterparts in Ontario or Quebec who were taking advantage of utility services provided by public crown corporations.
The government said to Alberta and private utility consumers that it was sorry they did not count as much as the people being serviced by crown corporation utility providers. It made a technical change in the tax act like the one in Bill C-28. It made a technical change, a housekeeping amendment, that most people did not notice. The government called it a spending cut and generated a few hundred million dollars in new revenue out of the pockets of hard pressed taxpayers whose utility bills principally in the province of Alberta went up.
That is what the change to PUITTA did. It is the same kind of back door, sneaky tax increase we find in Bill C-28, which we in the official opposition are trying to rectify through this motion.
In closing, my party and I believe in a principle known as subsidiary, a principle of political theory which suggests—and I believe it is a self-evident truth—that the lowest level of government, the level of government closest to people is the best level of government to serve them. We need to respect that level of government, not to treat it in the backhanded manner the bill seeks to do. We say to municipal politicians and property taxpayers that we want to avoid this back door tax increase. That is why we seek support for Motion No. 1.