The hon. member says she does not like him. That is her privilege.
I will refer to what he said to a conference of Canadians from across Canada: “Do not, first of all, give us grants and subsidies; rather, reduce our taxes. We will use the resources that are left in our pockets, that are left in our province, that are left in our corporations to greater advantage than if you filter them through the government”.
That was a premier who was saying “Let individual Canadians keep the money, the individual New Brunswicker”, rather than sending the money to Ottawa and then having it returned to the provinces to be filtered down.
In that process a lot of people lose money. They do not make money. I would suggest that even the hon. member who thinks Mr. McKenna does not know what he is talking about would spend her money more effectively than if she gave it to the premier of New Brunswick, the Prime Minister of Canada or any other politician or bureaucrat. She is wise in the expenditure of money. That is why she is here today. She knows how to spend money properly. She wants to represent her people so that they will be able to apply their resources in the best way possible. I commend her for that.
Allowing people to apply their own initiative, their own resourcefulness, would create a better world than the kind of world a government would create. The government's role should be to create an environment so that individuals can apply their skills, abilities and energies in a way that will be most productive.
The relationship between the federal government and the provinces has often been compromised by conflict, by the federal government intruding into provincial jurisdiction and by confrontation.
The national energy program created a direct confrontation with at least one province in Canada, but I will take an example that applies to every province, health care.
We know there was a time when the Liberal government, the current group that is in charge of Canada today, said it would never ever pay less than 50% of health care costs in Canada. It promised that would never change, and it underlined never. However, it did.
Not only did the amount change, but even as the proportion of the funding that came from the federal government changed it insisted that the provinces would get less money. And guess what? The provinces could not decide how they would make up the difference because they were told what to do by the federal government.
In other words, if a province wanted to introduce a special fee for a service it was not allowed to do that. If the province wanted the money it would have to spend it the way it was told to spend it.
That is not only unfair, it is downright dirty. Why would anybody want to do that? It took away the money and then told the provinces “Now you have less money to do this job. Do it our way”. Talk about conflict. Talk about confrontation. That is exactly what happened.
I want to return to the issue of interprovincial trade barriers. The Constitution says that we should have the free movement of goods and services across provincial boundaries. We want that. We want that very much.
The federal government has the responsibility to enforce the Constitution of Canada. What have we had? Nothing.
We agree that this is what we want and what does the federal government do? Nothing. How do we put those things together?
The government chooses to interpret the Constitution the way it wants to, the way it seems will be most advantageous to further its political agenda.
Do I blame the government for that? The Liberal Party has done that forever. The time has come for us not to do it from the top down, but to do it from the bottom up.
Canadians would take a different approach. Canadians want those barriers removed.
I was talking to a fellow in Ontario last week. He said that he finds it more difficult to trade his commodities across provinces than to ship them south into the United States.
What kind of sense does that make? On the one hand we have this great equalization program and then we make it difficult for the provinces to develop their economies by trading within their own country. However, they can trade freely across other borders. There is no logic. A decision has been made, but there has been no action.
I want to refer to a certain provision in this bill which I find absolutely insulting. I do not know if I should say insulting. It really caused me to envision all kinds of terrible things about what this government is really trying to do.
There are 33 tax elements. Guess what? I want to read this into the record. I know the parliamentary secretary is laughing. I think he knows exactly what I will read into the record.
There will be in these new 33 taxes eight different measures for oil and gas revenues. There will be eight different measures. How many different ways will gas and oil be measured? This is the list. There will be conventional new oil revenues. That is “conventional” and “new oil”. Then there will be conventional old oil revenues. These are somehow different. There is new oil and there is old oil, but in both cases it is conventional oil. I guess the difference is drawn between new and old. Where will the line be drawn between what is new and what is old, that which was covered last week or that which was covered a year ago? What is new? What is old? That is one complication.
Then there are heavy oil revenues. I guess that heavy oil weighs more per barrel than the other oil. I know better than that, but is it not interesting that they separate heavy oil from conventional oil? It talks about mined oil revenues. Those are the four oils.
Then it goes into the natural gas: domestically sold natural gas revenues, exported natural gas revenues, sales of crown leases and reservations on oil and natural gas lands. There are three gas measures and four oil measures. Here comes the catch all: oil and gas revenues, other than those described in paragraphs (q) to (w).
There are eight different ways of saying the same thing. The government wants to tax all oil and gas revenues, whether they are from conventional oil, heavy oil, old oil, new oil, gas, whether its sold domestically or whether it is exported. The government simply wants to tax all the revenues from oil and gas. Why in the world can it not say that? No, the government has to write it eight different ways. That is what is going on here. It is needlessly complicated.