Mr. Speaker, I cannot tell the House how incensed I am that the government is not listening.
I was on the finance committee. Every witness said this was wrong because it would kill service to small communities. Yet the government is invoking time allocation to speed through a process of collecting a tax. It has nothing to do with increased security. Security would be there anyway. We are told in any case that no new measures would be in place until the fall.
The government is invoking time allocation to collect a new tax which would be punitive to small carriers, detrimental to our economy and way beyond what is necessary. It is incredible that we want to jam it through parliament when the committee asked for studies and the studies have not been done.
The secretary of state talked about 20:20 hindsight. He is projecting that the government will use hindsight. It will wait until the carriers are pushed under. Next fall it will look back to see how many of them went belly up. Then it will change the tax. I say big deal. Why do we not look ahead and say this is the anticipated result?
The secretary of state is an economist. He is supposed to be a specialist in projecting the future, not simply looking back. It is time the government listened and did the right thing. Why should we jam the bill through, do it incorrectly and kill the industry?
Before September 11 the airlines were in trouble because our economy was going down. September 11 made it much worse. Invoking time allocation on the bill would hasten the demise of our small air carriers. That is what the government has as its priority.
Can the secretary of state tell us why there is a big hurry when the facts are not even in? We should be looking at the facts of the case and not blindly following an agenda.