Ten new historic lows, unbelievably, and what are we talking about? A reciprocal taxation agreement with Chile, Croatia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
We are concerned about taxation on this side, specifically about the issue of double taxation which the bill purports to deal with. However I would like to ask the government opposite why it is not concerned about double taxation in Canada. For crying out loud, we have GST on provincial sales taxes and we have GST on fuel taxes in this country. Why does the government not move a bill that would remove that type of double taxation? No. It is only good when it involves countries outside Canada. It is a disgrace that it has such a skimpy agenda.
My friends opposite have pointed to other issues. I will point to one as well. We have the social union that is being considered by the provinces right now. We have the federal government balking at dealing with the provinces. They are bringing forward for the first time in a long time a unified proposal. We should see the federal government embracing some of the things that are being brought forward by the provinces. Instead we are dealing with Bill S-16. It is absolutely unbelievable.
I point to an issue that has been heating up all summer and actually deals specifically with the bill but not in the way the government was proposing. I am talking about the Senate elections in Alberta.
Here we have a bill initiated in the Senate, a bill that, granted, is not a big important bill. However it deals with taxation. If a bill begins in a place where there are not elected people but actually patronage appointments, it is fair to say that essentially what we have here is a case of a taxation bill being drawn without representation. I am extraordinarily concerned that we are allowing this to continue to happen in this place. We have pointed this out before.
People in the lower house are elected; people in the upper house are appointed. They are friends of the Prime Minister and previous prime ministers. They are great hockey players in some cases but they are not people who were elected. They do not necessarily bring any expertise to these issues. I am disappointed that we have to lecture the government once again on what democracy is all about.
Today we had a great democrat speak in this place, Nelson Mandela. He spoke about democracy and I thought how ironic that we have Nelson Mandela in this place speaking about democracy and the government balks at allowing democracy to happen in Alberta.
In Alberta today we are trying to hold a Senate election. We had 600,000 people vote in the previous Senate election in Alberta and we actually elected a senator. Finally Brian Mulroney was forced because of tremendous public pressure to put Stan Waters, a Reformer, into the Senate, the first really truly accountable senator who has ever sat in that place.
Now we are proposing to do the same thing again, and what do we get from the Prime Minister? He says the Senate election is a joke. That is what he thinks of Albertans. I will tell the House what is a joke. I think the joke is the government's approach to the people of Alberta and to democracy. It is ridiculous that the Liberals will sit there day after day and say that we rejected a Senate of an elected nature under the Charlottetown accord. Therefore they will not give us any chance to elect senators at all.
The Prime Minister knows that is absolutely untrue. We rejected many aspects of the Charlottetown accord. We rejected specific things about the Senate proposal in the accord but we really rejected it because it would not lead to a triple E Senate, something that Albertans believe in very strongly.
The other day one of my colleagues asked the Prime Minister what he had done in the last five years since he had been in office to promote a triple E Senate, to promote an elected Senate. He could not answer. He has not done one thing in five years despite the fact that this is the most important constitutional issue, and even non-constitutional unity issue, for Albertans.
Despite that fact, the Prime Minister could not name one thing his government had done to push the issue of Senate reform. Now the Government of Alberta and Reformers have taken matters into their own hands. Hopefully they will embarrass the government a bit by showing it how democracy is supposed to work.
On October 19 four candidates for the position of senator will be on the ballot when Albertans go to the polls during their municipal elections. Two of those people will be selected and will ultimately be suggested to the Prime Minister when the next Senate vacancy comes up in Alberta. We certainly hope that this time around the Prime Minister will heed the wishes of Albertans who frankly were quite insulted the other day when the Prime Minister went ahead, even during a Senate election, and chose to put a patronage appointee back into the Senate. It is absolutely disgusting.
I will wrap up my remarks by saying that this is not an issue that Albertans will soon forget. We point out that we have been working on this matter for a number of years. One of my new colleagues, Bert Brown, who was nominated by Reformers the other day, has been working on the Senate issue for 16 years. His colleague, Ted Morton, who was also chosen by Reformers as a nominee for the Senate election, is a political scientist who has been working hard to push the issue of Senate reform for a long time.
We will not leave this issue alone. We will continue to pound away at the government on that issue and on the issues the government should be dealing with today such as lower taxes, not reciprocal tax agreements with other countries around the world. We will pound away on the issue of debt.
We want to know why there is not a bill before us today legislating debt paydown. We want to know why there is not legislation today dealing with some of the issues the provinces have raised in their recent discussions in Saskatoon. We want to know those things and we will continue to pound away.
We are putting the government on notice that we are prepared to bring these issues to this place, even if the government has become so disconnected from Canadians that the best it can do in its first week back is to bring in a bill dealing with reciprocal tax treaties with other countries around the world.
We think it is shameful and we are putting the government on notice that we will continue to bring these issues to the government, irrespective of the trashy legislation it has brought before us.