Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate this afternoon on Bill C-51. I will not surprise anyone in the House by saying that NDP members will be voting in favour of the bill. The entire first part of the bill implements the ways and means motion that we supported in the House just last month.
In particular, I want to highlight the inclusion in the bill of the first time home buyers' tax credit and the home renovation tax credit. Both of these measures have been well received in communities right across the country, and although it may be hard to believe inside the bubble of Ottawa, most Canadians had actually thought that the home renovation tax credit had been enacted long ago. Why else, after all, would the government be spending so many tax dollars promoting this program on television and on those big envelopes it is distributing for saving receipts?
Canadians did what their government asked of them. They stimulated their local economies by investing in home renovations, assured by their government that they would be eligible for a tax credit if they spent the money before February 1 of next year.
Let us not kid ourselves, voting against this tax credit now, after our constituents have spent their money in good faith, would be victimizing them yet again during the worst recession since the Great Depression. My constituents deserve better. All constituents deserve better. When I tell them that I am here to make Parliament work for them, I will walk that talk by voting in favour of this measure. No, it is not good enough to vote against this measure now and say we will implement it later, just look at what is ahead on the horizon.
In the 2009-10 provincial budget, the McGuinty Liberals announced that they would be harmonizing the provincial sales tax with the federal government's goods and services tax, effective July 1, 2010. This is terrible news for Ontarians because many items that we need and use every single day, from gas and electricity to newspapers and the Internet will now be subject to a full 8% tax increase at the point of purchase. It will also be charged on all labour costs incurred during home renovations. If the home renovation tax credit is delayed, any benefit from the program will largely be eaten up by the increased tax burden of the HST.
While I am on the HST, let me add this. This blatant tax grab might never have happened had the federal Conservative government not bribed its provincial Liberal counterparts to introduce it. Apparently Dalton McGuinty was reluctant to introduce such an unfair tax during this recession, so the federal finance minister urged him along by offering the Ontario government an additional $4.3 billion of federal tax money to introduce this new tax increase.