I am being told by government members that I should not overestimate the impact of the committee. I am not overestimating the impact of the committee. I talked to some members of the national media that day. It was testimony by Liberal members that led them to seek out single stations that were gouging across the country and blow that up into a bigger story. That is exactly what happened.
That led to all kinds of other dimensions, whereby when I left that committee meeting and drove into a west Ottawa neighbourhood, there was a lineup at the pump to buy fuel where I would rarely see cars at that time of night, fuel that was still selling for the same price 24 and 48 hours later. This was all, excuse the pun, pumped up by Liberal members with a personal agenda to try to avoid the real questions in their own backyards where they had problems, either with the truckers' strike in the case of New Brunswick or with some other pressure point at home where they really did not want to deal with the issue the government could control, which is tax revenues.
So not only did these members contribute to the panic, but they attacked the refining sector, because they knew they could not attack crude oil prices. Those are set on a worldwide basis. They could not or did not want to attack the dealers and they did not want to attack the taxation issue. There was only one thing left, which was attacking the refiners.
Despite all of that, the ministers walked in here today and delivered an absolutely contradictory message: that the reason we do not have more refinery capacity is because they have not had enough return on investment and therefore the government has a responsibility there. I am not sure what its responsibility is, according to what they were saying.
I know what the government's responsibility is. We need some investor confidence in this country, which will come only when we have an energy framework, a framework that this government has not delivered in spite of the fact it has been promising one for a long time.
That is what happened in the bubble of Ottawa. Unfortunately, at home the tax burden is keeping people away from work in some cases in the resource manufacturing or transportation sectors because of high fuel prices. People, especially seniors and those on fixed incomes, are extremely concerned about what will happen this winter.
We all know what is in the ability of the government to most readily influence, what it can do right away, and the Conservative members have been putting forth that point of view for a long time. We put it forth again at committee. At each and every opportunity where we could talk about tax cuts that would make sense for Canadian fuel, we were attacked for taking that position. Whenever groups representing part of an industrial sector or a consumer group gave the same kind of testimony, they were aggressively attacked for their position by the Liberal members on that committee. It was at the point where we actually had denial; the Liberal members denied that if there were a tax cut it would ever show up at the pump.
We have examples in Canada in which we can compare province to province, or we can compare Canada to the U.S., where, if there is a lower taxation regime, guess what, there are lower fuel prices. We have the example of Poland. Last week, against the advice of the European Commission, it dropped the excise tax on fuel by the equivalent of about 10¢ Canadian per litre. That is already being reflected in large part at the pumps. Poland is doing the right things for its economy.
As we heard from the industrial sector, it makes a lot more sense from an economic standpoint to tax outputs rather than inputs. At the very time when our government is talking about trying to deal with the fact that our productivity is lagging, there is a double reason why it would make sense to reduce the tax load on fuels. Also, as people have mentioned here tonight, there are the irrational taxes that were based on a premise. For example, we had a 1.5¢ excise tax on consumer gasoline to help pay the deficit, which has now been paid for eight years. This was a tax installed by the Conservatives, which was supposed to stay in until the deficit was slain. The deficit was slain eight years ago but the tax is still there.
Also to address the deficit, a 4¢ per litre excise tax was put on aviation fuel. It is still there. Over the last eight years, that tax has collected over $300 million. That tax is money taken directly out of the aviation sector, a sector that has had nothing but grief over the last eight years and could have very well used that money to good purpose, for a purpose a lot better than any single thing I could imagine it was actually put to use for by the government.
The other ogre that was brought up was about this 5¢ per litre going to the municipalities. I will wrap up in one sentence. It is 1.5¢. It is not statutorily enabled past this next year, which is still at the 1.5¢ level, and all of the rest of it is simply Liberal policy that may or may not come to pass.
What is it all about anyway? The provinces spend over 100% of their fuel revenues on roads, so what is the big deal about the federal government spending maybe 50% of fuel excise taxes, never mind the GST, on roads and infrastructure?