Mr. Speaker, we seem to be dealing with money all day today. First we had Bill C-72, an act to amend the Income Tax Act. My colleague just talked about how convoluted and complex it was and about how an amendment to the Income Tax Act was long overdue, not to add more convoluted taxes but to try to ensure that it is simple and Canadians understand the basis on which they are taxed.
People now have to sign tax returns and take the word of a professional that what is there is appropriate. They really do not understand the basis on which they are being taxed any more because the rules are so complex.
We now have entered the electronic age. A friend in my constituency, a tax professional who prepares corporate taxes on computer, finds that Revenue Canada requires the taxpayer to sign a statement saying that everything is true and correct. Yet the tax return contains line numbers and dollar amounts and there is no indication of what the dollar amounts are actually representing. However a statement is still at the end that certifying it to be true and correct. It is just a bunch of numbers with nothing on the tax return of any kind. We have to start thinking about the concept of Revenue Canada that says sign our lives away even though everybody knows taxpayers do not know what they are signing.
It will be interesting to hear what the Minister of National Revenue would have to say about that. He should seriously look at it. I wrote to him last week so I will be waiting with bated breath for his response. Maybe not with bated breath because it will take a little time.
Today we are talking about Bill C-71, an act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in parliament on February 16, 1999. It deals with a number of things. One is the trumpeted increase in funds to the Canada health and social transfer. There is no mention here or in government press releases that this is a small replacement of the money that was taken away in a previous parliament by a Liberal government. It states that the minister is authorized to pay $3.5 billion of those funds into a trust fund from which they will be distributed over a three year period beginning April 1, 1999.
The Minister of Finance has started a new concept whereby he takes all the cash and puts it in a trust fund, a separate bank account. Canadians not only cannot understand their tax return but now they are overtaxed, and the overtaxed money is sitting in bank accounts and is not even being used to provide services to them.
The auditor general has been very critical of the government in the past. He qualified the financial statements two years in a row saying that this could not be done. Here is another instance of the government collecting tax money, putting it in a bank account and leaving it there to be distributed over a period of time. First it was $800 million for the centre for innovation where the Minister of Finance wrote the cheque and the money was sitting in a bank account. As far as I am aware it still is sitting in a bank account providing no benefit, no research and no development for the taxpayers.
Last year it was $2.5 billion for the millennium scholarship fund. We put up this money through our taxes and it is now sitting in a bank account. The students are not benefiting from it because it is not going to be distributed until after the millennium.
This type of paying up front by the government has to stop. We have another $3.5 billion to be paid out over a number of years but the cash is sitting in a bank account.
After we add up $3.5 billion, $2.5 billion and $800 million, we see that almost $7 billion is going to get spent after the millennium. This sounds great, but it also happens to be just before the federal election. One wonders if there is a connection with spending this prepaid money just before the election. The Minister of Finance has all these goodies and has been trumpeting about how the government is benefiting Canadians but he is bribing them with their own money.
We can then talk about the $11.5 billion that he will put into health care. On top of that, there is the other $8 billion, which is on top of the $3.5 billion I was just talking about, that will be distributed over a four year period beginning April 1, 2000. It will be a year before we start to spend a penny of that and it will be spent over four years.
This $11.5 billion, that the minister takes great pride about putting back into health care, will be spent starting next year and continue over the subsequent four years. If we take this five year period at $2 billion a year, divided by 10 provinces, we have a few peanuts. This $11.5 billion is not an awful lot. Compared to the $20 billion that he cut out of health care, this is a drop in the bucket in return. That is only one part of the bill.
Another part of the bill deals with the suspension of binding arbitration for the civil servants. We wonder the civil service got a little bit upset at the collective bargaining process. When we take away the right to binding arbitration is it any wonder why the civil service gets a little upset and we have declining moral?
We have a government that does not want to enter into good faith bargaining. It wants to say “We are the big heavy stick. We are the government. We will impose our solution upon you if you are not prepared to bargain to a deal that we are prepared to offer you”. I would suggest this is pretty one-sided.
Why are we going through this farce of union negotiations? The government has made up its mind on how much it is going to offer. We can talk a little bit about it but the civil servants cannot go on strike or to binding arbitration. All we can do is talk about it and make the whole process look good. It is a sham. In the final analysis the government tells them to either take its offer or lump it. How can that lead to good employee moral?
The government is also talking about changes to the pension plan and the way we calculate the benefits. This morning the Minister of Finance tabled a bill in the House which shows that he intends to dip into the excess surplus accrual in the civil service pension plan. This is going to further exacerbate the problems of morale in the union.
Why does the government think it can help itself to all this cash and then stand up and say what a wonderful job it is doing in managing the finances? It is courtesy of the employees. The government is going to help itself to the surplus in their pension plan and the minister will say that he has done a great job in managing the finances.
The other thing is in part 5 where we are granting some bands the opportunity to tax fuel and tobacco. After reading through this it seems to me that natives on the reserves are tax exempt. They do not pay taxes on tobacco, fuel and so on.
It seems to me that we have had some debates over the years on municipalities wanting to tax fuel and things like that because of the high expenditure of maintaining roads. They have never been allowed to do such things, but here we have this creeping concept of granting more and more taxing powers to first nations. I am a little concerned about that because the more taxing powers the first nations have, the more they have to be accountable for that money. First nations today call themselves governments and want to be treated as a government, nut when it comes to the cash, they want to be looked upon as a private corporation and we are to keep our noses out of their finances.
I am aware of at least one band that is paying a member $1,000 a month on a stand-by contract to remove snow. This is fine in the wintertime but I understand this contract goes for 12 months a year. We cannot get this information out on the table. We do not have them being open and transparent with their money, which they have to be.