A nice fellow indeed. I asked him how much he gave to charity the previous year and he said nothing, that it was not his responsibility but the responsibility of the government. I said to him “Therein lies the difference betwixt thee and me. I believe in being generous with my money; you believe in being generous with everybody else's money”. That is what is wrong in the whole premise of adding yet another tax on to people who are trying to make money.
Here is an interesting twist, though. A New Democratic member has proposed the motion and the motion has been amended by the socialists on the other side of us here. The motion says that the government should enact a tax on financial transactions in concert with the international community.
This tax on financial transactions has been taken out in the wording of the amendment by the Bloc, so we will first be voting on whether or not to promote the implementation of a tax aimed at discouraging speculation on fluctuations in the exchange rate.
This was put forward by an eminent scholar, an economist, a Nobel prize winner who knew a lot, but I seriously question whether a small tax on a transaction will make any difference at all. Everybody who deals in the market, whether it is the money market or any other market, is quite willing to pay the transaction fee which accrues to the dealers. It does not discourage it at all. As a means of discouraging speculation, it is a wrong headed idea. We would have to put such a high tax on it to actually discourage the process that it would basically cause economic chaos around the world, as if we do not have enough of that already.
I would like to make a few comments on this tax. Generally what we tax we discourage. That is just simple human nature. I often think of my father who lives in a tax ridden province run by the NDP. He said when it brought in the GST, which was added to the PST, that it was one tax he could avoid. Whereas my father used to buy a new car every four or five years, he drove his car for ten or twelves years after that. I do not remember exactly how long it was before he traded it, but he said that he did not have to buy a new car.
As a result the GST and the PST discouraged him from entering into the marketplace and getting a new car. He just drove his old one. I think that was a good decision anyway. It was a perfectly good car. I will not do any free advertising for Oldsmobile here.
I remember reading about the Brits who at one time thought they were would tax rich people like NDP members always wanted. They say let us tax the rich so they leave the country like the finance minister does. He takes his business out of the country because he can get regime for taxes which is much more favourable. Let us tax these rich suckers so they leave and that way we will not have any jobs in this country. Everybody will be happy. This is NDP style.
The Brits came up with a wonderful measure of a tax for rich people. They would base it on the size, the total area, of windows in their houses. What should surprise us is that all the rich people who had homes with big windows boarded them up. The windows were not needed if they were to be taxed on them. That is so obvious.
What we have here is an attempt to manipulate human activity, whether it is an investment or elsewhere, by taxation. As far as I am concerned that is an unwelcome, unnecessary and immoral intrusion of government on our personal freedoms. We should be able to move in these areas without having government, through taxation or other means of coercion, try to influence, determine and prevent us from doing what we want and instead try to tell us what to do.
There is another big problem with this tax. I have already mentioned the finance minister and his steamship companies. These companies are registered offshore. There are advantages that way. How can we ever presume that a Tobin tax will be accepted by every country? If all countries agree to do this, except 5, 8 or 12, then those are the countries that will become havens for the investors. Investors can go to these countries and do financial transactions without being taxed. That is exactly what they will do. That is human nature. I cannot blame people for making those decisions when greedy governments insist on taxing us to death to the point where we can hardly survive because so much of our income is confiscated from us.
There is another very important aspect to this. How do we ever get agreement among countries to co-operate on this in terms of how they are to collect the tax and how it is to be distributed?
We have this insane move by the minister of culture who thinks she will help the country by putting a tax on magnetic tape, notwithstanding that a lot of it is used for purposes totally unrelated to the recording of artists' materials. She will take the tax from this and have a whole bureaucracy. The government will soon announce the rate of this tax which will be retroactive. That will make people every bit as happy as the GST ever did.
The minister will take this tax and redistribute the money. That is an absolutely insane idea. We have taxes on taxes. We have great difficulty in coming up with a bureaucracy that is big enough and efficient enough that it actually earns more money than it costs to administer. What is the point of having a tax that returns nothing to the government or to the people of the nation because the cost of administration is so high?
This member certainly has his ideas. He is welcome to them. That is the wonder of democracy, the wonder of freedom of speech and I hope we can keep it. I have my doubts in this place because of the high handed government on the other side. It is the member's right to put forward this motion. He has done that. I recommend that all members think hard before they support this motion because it is wrong headed, going nowhere and will not be successful. It is a bad idea. Let us all be sure that it is firmly defeated.