Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to address the Bloc motion today which I shall read into the record so members and people watching this on television will understand what we are doing:
That, in the opinion of this House, a special parliamentary committee of the House of Commons should be struck in order to consider the possibility of Canada's participation in the creation of pan-American monetary union.
On behalf of the Reform Party, I think my colleagues do not have anything against the motion or do not have great concerns about this motion. It is well and fine to discuss this and send it to some kind of committee. That is not a problem at all. What I am concerned about is that in doing this we will start to take some of the attention away from the dreadful record of this government when it comes to the Canadian dollar. I will address that in a moment.
First let me address some of the pros and cons of having a pan-American currency. Many people have discussed this lately with the advent of the Euro. There are some good aspects and some bad aspects. The sovereignty issue is one of the biggest issues people are concerned about. Their concerns are very valid. The Canadian currency is a repository for many of our symbols. My colleagues in the Liberal Party have made some good arguments about that. That is fine. We acknowledge that that is a big issue.
Some of the pros of doing this, of having a pan-American currency, would be things like business issues. Some businesses have for a very long time been sheltered from competitive pressures because the dollar has been used as a buffer to protect them. All of a sudden that would be gone. They would then be forced to compete and improve their products and services. In doing that they would raise the standard of living of Canadians. That is one of the great advantages.
There are disadvantages too. We are in a country where so much of our GDP is dependent on commodity prices. We have seen this recently. If all of a sudden commodity prices go in the tank and the dollar cannot adjust for it, we run into a situation where we may have some dislocation, some unemployment and those sorts of things. We should have that discussion but it is not timely to have that discussion today.
The real issue today and the things we have discussed in the House of Commons in the last couple of days are the ones we should keep discussing. I am talking about this government's dreadful record in protecting the Canadian dollar under the system we currently have.
This is an important issue not because it is important that our dollar be at some particular number or figure but because where the dollar is tells us something about the state of the Canadian economy. Many people regard the dollar and the level it is at as a barometer of the health of the Canadian economy. We should become concerned when we see it fall to record lows. We saw that happen this summer. Frankly, it has barely budged from that point.
It was not long ago, in fact just a few years ago, when we had the current finance minister, at the time running for the leadership of the Liberal Party, rip the Conservative finance minister at that time, Michael Wilson, because the dollar had fallen below 80 cents. He said it would be a free fall. It would collapse if it went below 70 cents. Under this government it is at 65 cents. It is bad enough that the dollar has fallen. When our dollar is that weak it effectively means that Canadian families have to face a pay cut because they are now buying imports with those cheaper dollars. That in and of itself is a bad thing.
It goes beyond that. As I said, the state of the dollar is also a barometer of the health of the economy. When the dollar falls that dramatically and is so listless as it is today that tells us a lot about the policies of the government. It tells us a lot about the fiscal policies of this government.
Let us discuss some of those. We know Canadian productivity is absolutely in the tank. We have report after report drawing attention to this. We see the OECD issue a report that talks about Canadian productivity falling dramatically although at one point we were one of the leaders in the world. We know from companies like Nesbitt Burns that our productivity is in the tank. The industry department of the Government of Canada has pointed out that Canadian productivity is lagging.
As we know from economics 101, if we are producing less, not as much as other countries, if our productivity is not staying up there, we are not producing as much wealth and our standard of living is falling. That is one of the primary reasons why Canadians today feel hard done by. They do not necessarily understand all the arguments being made in this place today but they know they just do not have as much money as they used to have at the end of the month to pay the bills. That is a tragedy. This is not just an economic debate. It is a debate about the situation many Canadian families are in today.
Just before Christmas the industry minister revealed, perhaps unwittingly, the policy of this government when he said that high taxes aid productivity in Canada. That is what the industry minister, the would-be finance minister, said. The Reform Party, the official opposition, thinks the industry minister is off his rocker. We say that high taxes are one of the things that kill productivity in the country. We say that high taxes make us less competitive. We say that when you have high taxes you have a weak currency. That is exactly what we told the government again today.
The government's defence is to drag out a report done by KPMG consulting that states that the two biggest selling advantages of Canada when we try to promote it around the world to attract investment are low wages and a weak currency. Talk about trying to put the best face on a bad situation. It does not talk about how our taxes are so competitive and how we are attracting business that way, in the manner Ireland has done it over the past several years, or the United States, the U.K. or other countries.
The government trots out these arguments which at best would seem to be acts of desperation when it starts boasting that we have low wages. The fact that we have low wages may attract some business but my friends across the way would have to admit it is a third world argument. The people who are being paid those low wages are not very thrilled about it. They want to see wages going up.
We see this pattern over and over again where the government is faced with all this bad news and tries desperately to put some good face on it. It would take 100 Mary Kay beauty consultants to dress that argument up and make it look good. Canadians do not buy it for a second. They are tired of seeing their standard of living eroded, and they see it over and over again under this government. They see taxes going through the roof, they see a $580 billion debt and they intuitively understand that is connected to the state of the Canadian dollar and their eroding standard of living.
We ask the government to set aside the feeble arguments it has been making about Canada being attractive because we do not pay our people very well and Canadians are willing to work for peanuts. Set those arguments aside and address the issue head on and say we have a tax problem. Our taxes are 30% to 40% higher than in the United States.