Mr. Speaker, I would make the case that I am reading a direct quote from a CBC interview. I think that is allowed.
Mr. Préfontaine said, “Mr. Martin's assets are in a blind management trust”.
I would raise the issue with the House that if it was the case that the former minister of finance's business was in a blind management trust, maybe he did not know about it. But we know a lot about that since the time; that there were special rules written by the ethics counsellor for the former finance minister's companies. He had a chance to look at it all the time, so it was not true that it was in a blind management trust.
This practice of course attracted a lot of attention, particularly because officials at the Department of Finance and a special taxation committee recommended closing these loopholes in Canada's tax laws. The current Auditor General criticized their existence. Two auditors general have spoken very clearly on this. Mr. Desautels said it was costing Canadian taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and wanted it closed off. It was closed off in one area, but loopholes were left in another. The current Auditor General criticized their existence, rightly pointing out that these tax havens were unfair to other Canadian taxpayers.
When asked about the situation in the House of Commons, the current Minister of Finance, and I know because I asked some of these questions myself, made a vague reference to discussions between Barbados and Canada with respect to the treatment of income of international business corporations and the repatriation of active business income to Canadian firms. Basically, he stonewalled.
And again today, when the revenue minister had the opportunity to say “we are going to close off these loopholes, we know there is a problem here”, she basically dismissed this argument as partisan. I cannot understand why the minister would do this, except that maybe she wants to keep her job and thinks that once the new prime minister is in place she will still be in cabinet.
There has been a lot of talk about Liberal arrogance. Imagine the nerve of the government allowing these tax havens to exist and allowing some people to bring their dividends home tax free, while at the same time the revenue department has been accused, and I think rightly so, of harassing the mom and pop operations, the corner stores across the country, which have to put up with audits all the time.
So there is one set of rules for small business and individuals in Canada and another set of rules for the elite. It is galling enough that it involved the former minister of finance. Now he aspires to be even higher in government. He wants to be the prime minister. How can this man relate to the Canadian public? Most people who do not want to pay taxes in Canada think our taxes are too high. We have Canadian professionals coming right out of university saying taxes are too high and they are going to move to the United States. But they then go and live in the United States. They do not try to have it both ways. They do not try to avoid paying tax in Canada and then try to enjoy all the benefits of the Canadian system that those taxes generate from other people. It is absolute hypocrisy. I think it is hypocrisy of the worst kind.
I hope very much that this is exposed in the run-up to the next election. I think it is going to be a huge issue, which needs to be dealt with. It seems to me that a person who aspires to be prime minister should be able to relate to the Canadian public. He should be able to relate to the person who says that these high taxes are hurting us.
High taxes are hurting us, and the taxes are being collected for what? They are being wasted on ad contracts. We have a big RCMP investigation of the Liberal Party itself in Quebec right now. We had the HRDC scandal, when they lost a billion dollars of taxpayers' money. How does that relate to someone in this House who is in a position of authority and does not have to pay any taxes, saying, “Oh, that does not really bother me that much, because I do not pay taxes.” I think that is the height of hypocrisy and he should pay a heavy price in the next election.