Mr. Speaker, I am sorry. I may have been mistaken. I believe they may have thought I said Preston, but I in fact said that we need to press on. If we are going to provide a national alternative to this government, we need to press on and work co-operatively to ensure that happens.
Back to private member's Bill C-502, which is of course the important piece of legislation that we are discussing at this time. It is very important that we encourage those people who are inclined to study and educate themselves to become mechanics and pursue this line of work. We have a shortage of skilled mechanics right now across Canada. From a labour market flexibility perspective, there are not enough people doing this work at this time which creates significant problems for the Canadian automobile industry.
As I mentioned earlier, the finance committee has been consistent in recommending in both the 1996 and 1997 prebudget reports that we allow the tax deductibility of tools and amend the Income Tax Act to facilitate that. The finance committee makes a lot of recommendations, some of which the government takes seriously and some of which it does not. It treats recommendations from the finance committee or from any other agency or committee like a buffet. It chooses from the buffet and consumes, in terms of public policy, what it deems to be politically palatable and leaves the rest. The unfortunate thing is that Canadians are not getting the issues dealt with in the serious visionary way they need.
When I first looked at the legislation, my initial concern was that it would further complicate the tax code. I am really concerned that the Canadian tax code is far too complicated and too complex. It encourages one type of behaviour and discourages another. I call it a Pavlovian tax code. There is a bit of Pavlovian psychology in trying to encourage Canadians to do some things and the government trying to discourage other types of behaviours.
Governments are very poor at picking winners and losers in terms of tax policy and incentives. I am typically very much adverse to an amendment that would further complicate the tax code. I then thought about it and asked myself what the chances were that we would get any serious tax reform out of the government opposite or any significant broad based tax relief. I thought that the chances were probably fairly low.
If we could get some type of tax relief for hard-working mechanics across Canada, even if it would further complicate the tax code—and that is not something we want to see—and even if it only came in bit by bit, that would be a positive step.
What we would really like to see is the Canadian government actually dealing with the tax issue and the systemic flaws in the tax code in a more holistic manner. The most important purpose of taxation is obviously to raise revenue. Another purpose, to a certain extent, is the redistribution of income. However, our tax code is trying to do too many things within the Canadian structure. We need to adapt our tax structure and our transfer structure. We need to take a serious look at changing and updating our equalization system.
There has recently been a trend among provinces to adopt a predatory tax policy to reduce taxes in order to attract businesses and people to the provinces. I think that is actually very sound. It has been done in Alberta with Premier Klein and in Ontario with Premier Harris. We have seen it more recently in New Brunswick with the new Premier Bernard Lord. Tax reduction and significant tax cuts resonate significantly with Canadians as do messages from governments that keep their word. Mike Harris and Ralph Klein have remained consistent in keeping their word and providing meaningful tax relief to Canadians.
With provinces pursuing predatory tax policy, the perverse impact would ultimately be that the provinces that can least afford to have an aggressive tax policy, the provinces that need economic growth the most, like in Atlantic Canada, will actually have the highest tax rates because their fiscal situations do not allow them to reduce taxes.
I would suggest that one of the issues the Canadian government should be looking at is a change to the equalization system and to the tax and transfer system such that over a 10 year period governments, like the one of Bernard Lord in New Brunswick or the future government of John Hamm, the future Progressive Conservative premier of Nova Scotia, could see, over a period of time, incentives to the equalization system to reduce their provincial taxes. Over a period of time, the equalization system would be phased into a system that would actually encourage provinces to reduce taxes. Currently the opposite is the case.
This is just one of the issues that needs to be dealt with. There are literally hundreds of issues within the tax system that need to be addressed. Canadians need a significant overhaul of the tax code in Canada. We have not had serious tax reform since the early 1990s, some in the late 1980s, both of which were under the previous Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney, which had the vision to do what was right but not always what was popular. Prior to that, the last serious tax code reform was back in 1971 with the Carter commission.
The fact is that now more than ever, with a globally competitive environment, we need to move forward and address the single biggest impediment to growth, jobs and prosperity in Canada: a Canadian taxation system and tax code that is archaic and is not working. We want to get Canadians working.