Mr. Speaker, I will focus my 10 minutes on a single theme, which is that the finance minister, through his actions, has demonstrated himself to be more out of his depth than any finance minister in living history. As if honest incompetence was not enough, in some instances there was less than total candour involved as well.
I will make my argument through five exhibits.
Exhibit one goes back a bit in history when the minister was a very senior member of the Ontario government. It ran an election campaign on a balanced budget, which turned out to be a $5.8 billion deficit. Therefore, it was incompetent to have a $5.8 billion deficit, but it was less than candid to claim to be running on a balanced budget.
Exhibit two is he raised the income tax and cut the GST. He paid for the GST cut by raising income tax. Not only is such a move denounced by every economist on the planet, but I think most Canadians would rather have more money in their wallets through an income tax cut than an extra penny on the price of a cup of coffee. To compound this economic incompetence with the lack of candour, he keeps referring to a cut in income tax when all Canadians know that he raised the lowest rate of income tax.
Exhibit three is the feebate structure in the auto sector. This is an incredible design where 75% of the money goes to one model, which is not particularly better than others environmentally speaking and it is made outside Canada.
Mr. Dennis DesRosiers, who I know the gentleman and who usually speaks very mildly, was so moved to say the following:
(Honda) felt so slighted by this stupid `feebate' that they have...come out guns ablazing. The feds now not only have a policy in place that does not work, they have also turned the company most willing to work...to address the auto issues of the day into an advertising juggernaut criticizing the federal government's policies.
That is another piece of evidence suggesting he is out of his depth.
Exhibit four is interest deductibility. Here again we have people who do not usually use such strong language in respect to a minister of finance. Allan Lanthier, retired senior partner of Ernst & Young, has said it is “the single most misguided policy I've seen out of Ottawa in 35 years”.
Claude Lamoureux, chief executive of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, has said, “This is unbelievable. I don't know who in finance looked at this. I can't believe any sensible person would do this”.
At the end of the day those people and the Liberal Party plan got to the minister because he did a flip-flop on interest deductibility, but it was even an incompetently executed flip-flop. The solution that he has gone to is not the right solution.
The abuse in this area is related to debt dumping, not double-dipping. To paraphrase former President Bill Clinton, it is debt dumping stupid, it is not double-dipping that is the problem.
Last but by no means least, there is the issue of income trusts. Here again we have people who normally use moderate language. I will quote two international experts, who make me somewhat embarrassed to be a Canadian in the face of this incompetence.
We have the Gartner Letter, a well-known London expert who sends his letter to people in the financial world all over the world. He said the Canadian finance minister's “idiotic 'trust' taxation decision rendered last October 31st, which we still believe ranks as one of the worst decisions ever rendered by a person in a position of monetary authority”. That is from a British expert in the financial markets and it goes out all over the world.
If that is not enough, here is what an American expert said.
It is interesting that a program which was originally designed to enhance 'tax fairness' may end up not only costing the government revenue but ownership is passing from Canadians to foreign entities. I doubt this was the plan.
The question now is, how much of this can the government take? Will they admit this was an ill-conceived idea, revise it, drop it or dig in their heels and in the face of the evidence which is starting to build, stay the course and let the foreigners buy up Canadian assets on the cheap?
That is from a U.S. income fund report.
We in the Liberal Party have fought the government's income trust plan from the beginning. We have sought allies from our colleagues in the other opposition parties.
I should add that at the beginning of the debate, the Bloc was with us on this. Together, we tabled a report in the House and we presented two options: the Liberal option and the Bloc option. Naturally, I found the Liberal option to be the better of the two, although the Bloc option was much better than the status quo.
Last week, in committee, I was astonished to see the Bloc vote against its very own proposal. The Bloc, which claims to stand up for the interests of Quebeckers, failed to stand up for the interests of Quebeckers; instead, it voted against its own proposal.
If the Bloc's problem is a lack of courage, the NDP is beyond the pale. Let me quote Don Francis, a 63-year-old individual who has lost $70,000 and who said the following before committee:
The NDP needs to rethink its position. This proposal targets hard-working Canadians for the benefit of all those fat cats. This is as clear a case of those fat cats eating the mice as this country has ever seen. Tommy Douglas is spinning in his grave to see NDPers like you acting like fat cats.
I would like to conclude by addressing all those hundreds of thousands of Canadians who lost millions and billions of dollars because of the government's broken promise on income trusts. I would like to tell those people that the fight is not over. We are at the beginning of the end of the battle and the battle will continue.
Even if this bill should pass the House, as it probably will, there is still the Senate. Even if that does not work, we will fight the income trust issue across the country. We have had many town halls before. Thousands of Canadians have attended. The Liberal Party will be holding one in the finance minister's riding soon. We will fight this proposal in the Senate and in town halls across the country throughout the summer. Last but not least, we will fight this in the next election.
The Liberal policy is clear. We are standing by our policy. It is better for the country. It provides help for all those income trust holders who lost thousands, millions, or billions because of the Conservative government's broken promise. We will get re-elected and we will bring back our own income trust policy, which will be a fine replacement to the terrible disastrous broken promise that has been imposed by the government, aided and abetted by the NDP, on hard-working Canadians.