Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity this afternoon to speak to Bill C-28, an act to amend the Income Tax Act.
Taxes are important. Everyone pays them, or at least everyone should. Of course, no one has to pay more than the law requires but, at the same time, the law should require that everyone make a just and reasonable effort.
Bill C-28 is a complex bill. It contains hundreds of clauses. It affects all sorts of provisions. It is a bill that, by and large, is in the public interest.
Unfortunately, it contains one clause, just one, that we have a problem with and that is clause 241. Others before me have pointed this out, and I am going to look at it as well. Between you and me, we are not going to pull any punches.
The situation is this: in accordance with his role and responsibility, the Minister of Finance introduced this bill. He sponsored it. The Minister of Finance must be above all suspicion. There should never be a situation in which anyone could think that the Minister of Finance was trying to use legislation to derive personal benefit.
And I most certainly want to believe that the Minister of Finance is above any suspicion, and is not trying to derive any such benefit.
But there is a problem with clause 241. The Minister of Finance owns Canada Steamship Lines. This is a large company, and the Minister of Finance is fortunate indeed to be the sole owner of this major company.
He put the company into a trust so as not to be able to intervene directly in its affairs and derive any benefit. That is all very well. It is indeed the normal and expected procedure to follow.
However, the Minister of Finance knows full well that the trustee of the Canada Steamship Lines, the company he owns, has not sold the shares to buy some woodlot. He did not sell the shares to buy a bus company. The Minister of Finance knows very well that he is still, through the trustee, the owner of his shipping company.
Companies with ships registered offshore stand to benefit financially from section 241, through a tax reduction. The Minister of Finance, through his trustee, is very much aware of the fact that his fleet is partially or totally registered offshore. The minister or his trustee used to his advantage some of the provisions already in the legislation, under which ships registered offshore somehow have less tax payable here in Canada.
I still find it a little strange that the Minister of Finance, who is in charge of taxing all Quebeckers and all Canadians, corporations and citizens, would shelter his company through existing fiscal provisions. It may be ludicrous, but it is legal.
Where the plot thickens is when section 241 is amended to allow shipping companies that meet specific criteria, just as that of the Minister of Finance does—to enjoy additional tax benefits.
Mind you, there are not that many shipping companies in Canada. If section 241 was giving some tax benefit to convenience stores and if the finance minister happened to own one, through a trust company, I would say that he will indeed get some benefit, but that so many store owners will get it too that he has certainly not done this just for his own sake.
I am not suggesting here that the finance minister has done this just for himself. But it does look kind of odd, and even more so because since the beginning of February, the Bloc Quebecois has been asking the finance minister, in a respectful way, with courtesy but also with determination, to clear up all manner of doubt on the risk of conflict of interest as far as section 241 is concerned.
We never got an answer from him. The Prime Minister himself jumped to his feet to tell us he trusts his finance minister. I should hope so. We should not expect anything less.
But you have to agree with me that this is not good enough to make Canadians believe everything is just fine. If the rules in our code of ethics provided that a minister should avoid all conflict of interest situations or that he should have the confidence of the Prime Minister, it would be all right because that is what the rules say.
But the real code of ethics does not say that. It says that a minister should avoid not only actual but also apparent conflicts of interest. That is the rule. What does the Prime Minister's confidence in his finance minister have to do with this? It is all very fine for him to trust his minister, but it would be much better if everybody could trust him.
Why does the finance minister refuse to shed light on this? Why does he not give us all the facts? Why does he hide behind the Prime Minister? Why does he not give all the information to the House and the media?
We have a problem. We asked that clause 241 be withdrawn from the bill, which would have allowed us to pass the rest of the bill with much less reluctance and then to deal with clause 241 on its merits. But this was all put in the same package. The Liberals put in the whole cake something that looks like a rotten fruit. Do they think I will eat this cake? Do they think that the Bloc Quebecois will eat this cake?
We will have to vote against the whole bill because of these few lines that let the worst suspicions hang over the finance minister. Perhaps he has a good explanation. The Prime Minister may be right to have confidence in his finance minister, but why not give us the evidence to support this confidence? In the absence of such evidence, all bets are off, not only for the members of the Bloc Quebecois, not only for the opposition members, but also for the members opposite, and especially for the people of Quebec and Canada.
As we all know, this kind of thing erodes people's confidence in the government machinery, in Parliament itself. Why are the Prime Minister and the finance minister not taking the opportunity today in this House to clarify the situation and restore confidence?
I will not be able to vote in favour of the bill before us because of the potentially rotten fruit in this cake poisoned by clause 241. I will not be able to vote in support of this bill, but I strongly hope that the finance minister will shed some light on the issue.
If he does not, the confidence that the people have in Parliament will be eroded and it will be the finance minister's fault.