Madam Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague from the Bloc for his motion. I think it is an important motion and I think colleagues around the House should support it.
The intention of the finance minister and the finance department probably was not to somehow circumvent the rules. Nevertheless, that is the position the government has put itself in. I think fairness and integrity dictate that members support the motion to avoid the appearance at least of a conflict of interest. Pretty clearly, that is what has happened.
My friend from the Bloc has talked about that at length. I want to talk about a variation on the theme. I want to talk about the irony in having Canada's finance minister have to shelter many of his own personal assets offshore to avoid paying the staggering taxes that so many Canadians have to pay. I think that is rather ironic. I think it would be very funny if not for the fact that every other Canadian really does not have the same opportunity to do that.
I say to the finance minister good for him, I am glad that he has found a way to avoid paying the same level of taxes that the rest of us pay. Truly I would like to see the same rules, the same compassion extended to all other taxpayers in this country.
Would it not be wonderful if somebody who runs the donut shop across Wellington Street could put up a Liberian flag so they did not have to pay the same high level of taxes they currently have to pay? Would it not be wonderful if in a garage in Rosetown, Saskatchewan they could put up a Panamanian flag so they did not have to pay the same staggering level of taxes they currently have to pay? It could go on and on.
I think members get the point. The fact is in Canada today people are driven to extraordinary lengths to not pay the level of taxes we currently have to pay.
As I pointed out in an earlier intervention, we have taxes that are among the highest in the world. Income tax is 56% higher than the G-7 average. I do not blame people for going to great lengths to avoid paying those taxes but it is killing this country.
There was an article in the weekend Globe and Mail about British Columbia's recession. Not long ago that province was leading the country in growth and now it is tenth in the country in terms of growth. One of the primary reasons for this is the combination of high taxes between the provincial and federal governments that has made British Columbia uncompetitive. It cannot deal with the competition from the northwest United States and the Pacific rim. Consequently that government and that province are in recession today.
I do not blame people for going to extraordinary lengths to find ways to not pay these high taxes. The sad result is that people are actually leaving the country. That is one way people deal with the problem of high taxes. Not long ago a Nesbitt Burns report was widely circulated in the media. It talked about how young Canadians, in particular university graduates and professionals, are leaving the country in droves to go to the United States in particular and to other jurisdictions where taxes are not through the roof. They want to find work where they will be allowed to keep enough income to live the types of lives they have dreamed about. They obviously feel they can no longer do that in Canada. That is sad.
The Nesbitt Burns report talked about the computer technicians this country is losing. That is terrible. We are losing doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers. Some of our brightest and best are disappearing from this country. It is not only an economic tragedy, it is a personal tragedy too. We are seeing families split up.
My friend, the hon. member for Red Deer, has three children. They have all left Canada to find work. One is in Norway. Another is a Rhodes scholar and is teaching in the U.S. at Harvard. He could not get a job in Canada so he left for greener pastures where the taxes are not so high. I believe this member has another daughter in the Netherlands. My friend, the hon. member for Calgary Southeast, has family spread out around the world as a result of the high taxes.
Who can blame the finance minister? He is only doing what everybody else is doing, trying to find ways to avoid the crushing burden of taxes in this country. The challenge to my friends across the way and to the finance minister is to find ways for people to enjoy their assets in Canada, to find a way for us to live the lives we want to live in Canada without having to pay taxes through the roof. That is a novel concept, is it not?
Instead of focusing on finding new and creative ways to spend $11 billion, which is what they chose to spend in the last budget, why do my friends across the way not find ways to lower the tax burden in this country to help Canadians out? What is wrong with that? Why do we have to drive people out of this country? People are voting with their feet. They are leaving. The brightest and the best are leaving. We cannot tolerate that.
It is time for my friends across the way to wake up and understand that clause 41 is a symptom of a much larger problem, that taxes in this country are too high. They are far too high. We are now in a position where Canadians work half the year just to pay the federal government. If I were to ask members in this House what they would call it if they had to go to work for six months of the year, had every cent taken and worked for no remuneration, they would call that slavery. But that is exactly what we do in Canada today. We spend half the year working for the government.
When is the government going to wake up and understand that this cannot continue? When is it going to do more than the half measures we saw in this budget? The government said that it introduced $7 billion in tax relief in the budget although it forgot to point out that it previously introduced new tax measures that would take $9 billion out of the economy. That would leave Canadians a couple of billion dollars worse off than they were last year. The government calls that tax relief. I call it robbery.
It is ridiculous that the government can get away with that type of thing. I hope that friends across the way will come to realize that bills like Bill C-28 are simply a symptom of the sickness of the government's perverse idea that it has to justify its existence by taxing people ever ever more. I ask them to reflect on the irony of a finance minister who has put his assets offshore so he does not have to pay the staggering level of taxation that we have in this country.
Surely there is a lesson for the House in this example. I would expect that friends in this House would come to appreciate that this is ridiculous. It is time to bring this to an end. I urge my friends to support the Bloc motion to oppose the inclusion of clause 241. We can no longer have taxation levels that are among the highest in the world, ones that not even the finance minister can afford.