Mr. Speaker, as we know, the Minister of Finance has reduced income taxes by a few hundred pages and a few hundred million dollars. Perhaps it will help the hon. member with his private member's bill. By reducing the tax and burden on businesses, hopefully they will not go bankrupt so fast. That is the spinoff. All things considered there are benefits here and there are benefits there. However not everything is good in Bill C-22.
The Minister of Finance stood up last fall, a couple of days before the election, and brought down a budget to tell us the good news about all the tax breaks. We could not understand why he wanted to do that in October. When he first came to power he said he would send the finance committee right across the country for prebudget consultations.
It costs the House of Commons and taxpayers of Canada approximately $400,000 to send the finance committee across the country to hear from about 500 different people and institutions and so on to find out what they want in the budget. It is a great big process the Minister of Finance put in place so that every year in February he can stand in this place and say he has listened to Canadians and this is what the government will do.
However with the election in the offing, he decided not to worry about consulting Canadians and came out with a bunch of goodies to buy the votes of Canadians to win the election.
Members may recall that he introduced in that budget a payment of $125 to everyone who qualified for the GST tax rebate to reduce the cost of their heating fuel. There was no analysis. This was strictly an election goodie. Tens of thousands of payments at $125, the bulk of the money for a total cost of $1.3 billion, went to people who did not have a heating fuel bill to pay. A large percentage of the lower income people lived in rented accommodation. They lived in apartments. Did they pay heating fuel? No, the landlord did. Did he get a cheque for $125? No, but all his tenants did. There was no real benefit other than it was a great election goodie.
The Liberal Party went around the countryside. It gave all low income people a chance to reduce the cost of their heating fuel but it never said how. Money went to people in prison, in graveyards and to people who did not qualify for a variety of reasons. Many had never seen a heating fuel bill in their lives. Kids living with their parents got the heating fuel rebate but the parents who paid the bills did not get a penny. Then to top it all off, there was some questionable legality to it.
The $125 payment was a grant and fell under the definition of a grant. Grants had to be published. The name and address of everybody who received a grant from the Government of Canada was public knowledge and therefore should have been published. The information was derived from the Income Tax Act. Everybody who filled out a tax return and qualified for the GST tax rebate was on the list, and as we know tax returns are confidential. So the government was in a quandary. It came to the public accounts committee and asked for an exemption from publishing the names of people because the Income Tax Act said it should be private and rules covering grants said it should be public.
In my opinion, section 241 of the Income Tax Act, which guarantees and protects the privacy of income tax returns by Canadians, did not give the Minister of Finance the authority to get these names in order to pay the $125 to these people who qualified by virtue of being a recipient of the GST rebate. I did not think they qualified.
The issue came up at the public accounts committee. One Liberal member suggested a legal opinion was needed prior to giving them the authority. Another Liberal member did not think a legal opinion was needed, that they could hold their noses and pass it.
I have serious questions about the legality of paying $125 to those people just so the Liberal government could run around the countryside last October and say that it was giving people money to reduce their heating bills regardless of whether it was money wasted, which it was. It was perhaps illegal but no one seems to care. The Liberals won the election, so who cares?
We play by certain rules in Canada, and one is that the rule of law is sacrosanct. I am not a lawyer and we never got a legal opinion, but I have serious questions about the legality of that payment. By its own admission, the government was in a quandary. The Income Tax Act says that we must keep everything confidential but grants and contributions rules say that we must make things public. The fact that the government was in a quandary should tell us there was a serious problem.
There are other issues. We in the Canadian Alliance have long pointed out the disparity between two income families and one income families. One income families pay more tax than two income families that earn the same amount of money. The family that decides a spouse will stay home to raise the kids rather than pass them along to a babysitter does not get a tax deduction. Who better in the world to raise children than mothers?
We celebrated Mother's Day yesterday. Unfortunately, far too many parents must put their kids in daycare rather than stay at home because the tax act discriminates. It discriminates against families that want to keep a parent at home to raise kids. How can that be? Our most precious resource is children. We discriminate against parents who love their kids and want to raise them.
I am splitting my time with the member for Kelowna. I forgot to mention that.
The point is that we discriminate against families. Why do we tolerate that? I hope Canadians recognize this in the next election and are not dazzled by payments, tax breaks and so on, some of which are of questionable legality. Canadians should vote for a party which says that it will stop discriminating against parents who want to raise their own children. That must be a fundamental right.
It was a big day yesterday for millions of Canadians across the country who took time to recognize their mothers and the great contribution they have made to their well-being, their nurturing and their growing up. They took time to recognize the wiping of tears, the hugs and the commitment that mothers and parents have for their children. However, the government discriminates against families. We collectively in this place are being asked to vote on a tax bill that would continue the discrimination. Surely that must be addressed and redressed.