Mr. Speaker, it is more than just mildly disturbing to see a minister so badly, as the member put it, screw up in this file, particularly in such an area of acute sensitivity, not only sensitivity for the companies that might be involved in this, but also for all taxpayers generally.
As a general proposition, all of us want tax fairness for everyone. There is not anybody, not a member in the House, who does not want tax fairness for everyone. That is not the issue. The real issue is we want tax certainty when we do tax planning. I will take a simple example like a deduction in our RRSP. Everybody knows we can deduct up to $18,000 against our current income and put it into our RRSP.
What happens if the Minister of Finance says that he is against that deduction? A lot of people would pretty upset if he made a blanket statement in his major budget document saying that he was against that deduction. Then over the next two months, he spent all kinds of time backing down and backing down, saying that he was not really against the deduction and that he would phase it in over two years. Then he would say, no, that he would phase it in over 10, then he would go back to five years and say that it was only tax deductions for a certain class of people, like people owing over $1 million, or it was only tax deductions for people who were earning over $1 million, but earning it somewhere other than Canada.
We are back down from the universe of everyone who deducts for RRSPs to a very small group of people who may or may not, under certain circumstances, be possibly abusing the system.
The minister should table it. He should let us know and then we can debate the actual merits of it. This is a bizarre way to be the chief person in Canada responsible for the nation's finances. I wake up in the morning wondering what his next blunder will be.
The GST was idiocy from the standpoint of intelligent management of the nation's finances. We do not up income tax to down consumption taxes. Everybody knows that. We do not say one thing in an election about income trusts and eight months later slam the folks into the ground. Now with this thing the entire business community, and that affects everyone, is very upset. They have lost a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Now the minister is backing right down.
I do not know what he means. I read the material issued this morning by the minister. Maybe there are clairvoyants who can read this better than I can, but I certainly do not know what he is talking about.