Mr. Speaker, with respect to Bill C-13, amendments to the Excise Tax Act which is, as the hon. the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance has indicated, essentially a series of technical amendments to the GST, its collection and its administration.
At the outset I would like to set down some principles from which the official opposition judges all tax related legislation. First, we believe that government should take not one penny more in taxes from Canadians through any source than is absolutely and strictly necessary for the efficient operation of necessary programs. That is to say, programs that are necessary to provide core services which are the exclusive jurisdictional responsibility of the federal government and, in a sense, to help those who cannot help themselves.
From that basic point, the one test with which I approach all fiscal matters is this: I ask myself if an extra dollar spent, collected by us through parliament and spent by politicians and bureaucrats in Ottawa, will do more good than that dollar left in the hand of a resident of my constituency who owns and operates a small business.
Generally, the answer to that question is a resounding no. The dollars we collect, including the approximately $20 billion net which we collect through the goods and services tax, is money which would be more powerfully used for social good if left in the hands of the creative men and women who earn that money and create that wealth in the first place. That is the first premise by which we judge all of these matters.
We then ask ourselves, if we are going to have taxes to finance necessary limited government programs within federal jurisdiction, how can we raise those taxes in a manner which is least destructive to the economy and which has a minimal distortional effect on the choices made by people freely in our economy every day.
I remind the House of the dictum that the power to tax is the power to destroy. All through history we see this lesson. There is a brilliant book about the history of taxation and its destructive power called For Good and Evil by Canadian author Charles Adams. In the book he relates through the centuries, beginning in ancient Egypt, how governments, monarchs, parliaments, congresses have imposed taxes which have had enormous unintended consequences, and how governments frequently do not understand that the power to tax will distort human behaviour, often for the worse.
Let me provide one interesting and humorous example. In the 16th century the British crown decided to bring forward something called the window tax. This was during the Tudor era of architecture. All of a sudden, one of the new luxuries which indicated social status was the capacity to install glass windows in one's residence.