Madam Speaker, I am just getting warmed up here. All of this is relevant because now we can send it to a Liberal controlled committee where debate is also curtailed by the heavy-handed democracy there.
Our day is so filled with crucial legislation that everyone awaits with eager anticipation to see what new pearl of wisdom will come out of this administration. My constituents tell me day after day that they would meet the suggestion with a few rude comments which I really cannot explain here.
It seems our days are going to be filled with sloppy bills that are badly designed and which go mere inches toward what the Canadian people are most in need of: real tax relief. Canada has miles to go to make up for decades of neglect and mismanagement. We can still vaguely remember the days when the dollar was at par or even above the U.S. dollar and when it was a real tragedy when unemployment rose above 5% or 6%.
The Liberals become masters at taking the proposals made by other parties, watering them down and offering the struggles of average Canadians as proof that their administrations were good for this country. That is not so. We have never had more proof than now in that Canadians are struggling to overcome the suffocating, self-righteous intrusions of this government. What success we enjoy as individuals or as small businesses is in spite of this government, not because of its misguided programs.
That is not to say the government cannot have a good idea once in a while. Bill C-72 has a clause that restores the previous $5,000 credit for investment in labour sponsored venture capital funds. Some of these funds are quite active and really serve a need.
Quite a few people lobbied hard for that inclusion last year and now we see it takes the finance minister only 12 months to get on board with the idea. This gives us hope that perhaps he will wise up to other proposals that interest Canadians.
The child care expense deduction has been raised to $7,000. That is a good start. We are always in favour of allowing Canadians to keep their own money. But this deduction is not available to all parents and that is a tragedy.
We have heard ministers opposite plant their Florsheims in their dental work time after time and spend precious days in this House arguing over what they really meant and who they meant to offend or not offend. We have wasted time arguing over who cares and does not care in this House. I suspect we have succeeded in showing the majority of Canadians that this place is more about playing politics than shaping public policy. That is a travesty.
The truth of the matter is that there are clauses in this bill that can be commended in principle. The life learning plan allows Canadian residents to take money out of their RRSPs, if they can afford to have any, to pay for full time training for themselves or their spouses. That is a great idea. I do not know if everyone in that situation can afford full time training as opposed to something a little more flexible, but the intent is a noble effort.
We are aware that RRSP contributions have fallen off in the last two years as well. There is something like $126 billion in unused contribution room outstanding. As I said, it is a noble effort and let us hope there are a few Canadians out there who can actually afford to get retrained and plan on using that retraining here in Canada rather than being forced to go to other countries by our high taxes.
I suggest the same analysis applies to another program concerning part time education. Eligible part time students can use education tax credits and child care expense deductions to go back to school. I presume that helps young single mothers in particular. There is a lot of merit in doing that.
I wish I could be more specific with these measures but the fact is that this government has pulled a fast one on all of us. The Library of Parliament was caught flat footed with this bill and it expressed extreme frustration that there was no time to properly analyze the clauses in this bill.
Even though Bill C-72 was supposedly printed on March 9, the date on the folder, the library had no access to a copy of it until March 17. The researcher complained that this omnibus bill was just too thick to get through and really understand it in less than a week. Yet we are expected to speak to it with two days' notice. What on earth is this government up to? Are we on a fast track again? The calendar is not crowded enough with significant legislation to justify this kind of bullying and arm twisting.
On top of that we are dealing with the tax code, probably the most thick-headed and misguided document in the English language. It is convoluted, complex, and all of those great terminologies. Lawyers have written in their own secret codes, 1,600 pages of every possible definition of every possible object, and they still have to take people to court to apply the statutes. It seems that Quebec can have plain language legislation to make legal documents truly available to the people they apply to, but this government shows no interest in that.
In thousands of cases every year, thousands of Canadians citizens and businesses are put through a wringer to get them to conform to an incomprehensible juggernaut of legalise and secret passwords that even Revenue Canada has to admit it gets wrong on occasion. However, it does not do that often because in the way of this government it has taken on the corporate culture of self-righteousness and the attitude that big government knows best.
What we do not see in Bill C-72 is any admission by the finance minister, his bureaucrats or any of the Liberal members on the finance committee that this system is out of control. We cannot afford it. We see a clause that reduces the individual surtax by a few more dollars. That is a good idea, but who on the government side would dare to stand to defend putting taxes on taxes in the first place? Yet this goes on year after year. Canadians are still waiting for this government and the previous government to wake up and straighten out the mess they have made.
The 5% surcharge which remains untouched for now falls on incomes as low as $60,000. There are thousands of workers in high tech industries or specialized manufacturing who can make that much. What do they do? They take their skills and their incomes and they maximize them south of the border. Brain drain is a common phenomenon. The Liberals maintain their punitive tax structures and wonder why Canadian artists, entrepreneurs, doctors and scientists head for a friendly climate. We could add hockey players to that list too.
It is not like they cannot see it coming. My home province of Saskatchewan started driving out opportunity and entrepreneurship years ago. It has been rewarded as being a have not province by the government in Ottawa. No wonder Roy Romanow and the Prime Minister get along so well. They have the same tax philosophy. We have a government that sees nothing wrong with discriminating against single income families and that perpetuates applying taxes on taxes, punishing the very people it relies on to pay the bills through taxes.
This government really has nothing important to contribute so it keeps its head down, trying really hard not to upset anybody, while it rushes half-baked legislation through the House. It hides behind self-fulfilling opinion polls and paid for studies that tell it what it wants to think. It only adds to the pile that makes up the tax code, never thinking that there might be something worthwhile underneath or another way to approach the subject.
It has been proven that lower taxation leads to higher revenues. Alberta and Ontario are certain proof of that. Ireland has just reduced its tax regime and it is booming. Why can we not catch on to that ideology?
Worst of all, it tables bills like this which announce all over again what Canadians have already heard and paid for in the previous budget.
The government is hungry for any positive PR spin. We heard the finance minister claim that the country can only afford his style of nickel and dime tax adjustments and that it costs the government to give people their money back. What a ludicrous idea. We have a new program to help farmers in the prairies; $85 million to top up their NISA accounts. The unfortunate part is that it is an insult. One very seldom qualifies for NISA. It is a net income thing. So the $85 million is really a teaser.
We know what it costs because year after year the finance minister announces that his programs will cost the treasury so many billions of dollars. He goes ahead and subtracts that amount from the nation's books. He takes it right out of the taxpayers' pockets.
I do not know if Canadians are picking up on this yet, but the day is rapidly approaching when they will finally put their finger on what bugs them about this government. The auditor general has done a great job of painting a picture of what the minister and his finance cronies are up to. Maybe Canadians view public accounting in much the same way as they do the tax code. It is very convoluted and complex. Nobody really understands it. But this practice is pretty easy to follow.
The minister makes an announcement of, say, $2.5 billion. Then, without parliamentary approval, he charges that to the expenditure side. The government says “Look we would like to give you that tax break, but you can see that there is no money left on the bottom line”. The money has taken wings and flown off to pay for a scholarship fund that nobody asked for. Few will enjoy it and it will not even come into existence for another full year. The way our Canadian dollar is shrinking the students may get 50 cents on the dollar by then. According to our tax code anyone who tried to run a business booking expenses that way would find themselves in deep trouble with Revenue Canada.
We are hiding it very well in this country, with our low productivity and so on, because of the strength of the American economy south of us, but we cannot count on that forever. We need to stand alone. The bills will come due and then everyone will see where these years of Liberal mismanagement have led us.
We are really lagging behind in our productivity against our American counterpart and others in the G-7. We have a low dollar, very high taxes and low productivity. The polls show us that no one really identifies with this concept of productivity. Maybe that is because it has been so long since we have had any that nobody recognizes it any more.
The Minister of Industry made several comments to that extent, which I would like to quote. He was addressing the issue of the standard of living in this country. He pointed out that since 1987, just a mere decade ago, Canada's standard of living has increased by only 7%. The standard of living of our counterpart to the south has increased by 17%. That is a 10% difference.
According to the slide that he was showing, the income gap between the U.S. and Canada is 30%, and growing at a rate of about a $9,000 difference in income between Canada and the United States. That correlates into about $28,000 for a family of four. Those are Statistics Canada's numbers.
With respect to the impact on Canada's productivity, the industry minister went on to say “Canada has the lowest growth rate in productivity in the G-7”. We are 17th in the world, which is certainly not good enough. Why? It is because of high taxes and the low dollar. We are paying more and getting less. It is very unfortunate.
The industry minister also pointed out that we have much higher taxes in Canada than they do in the United States. Our tax rate is 130% of that of the United States. If we couple that tax rate with the low dollar, we are on a downhill slide. We see omnibus bills like this which continue to shove Canadians farther down in that sinkhole of despair.
I would like to present an amendment at this time. I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following therefor:
this House declines to give second reading to Bill C-72, an act to amend the Income Tax Act, to implement measures that are consequential on changes to the Canada-U.S. Tax Convention (1980) and to amend the Income Tax Conventions Interpretation Act, the Old Age Security Act, the War Veterans Allowance Act and certain acts related to the Income Tax Act since the principle of the bill fails to address the federal tax system to end discrimination against single income families with children.