Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak on this issue. I will be relatively brief and concise, at least by the standards of the parliamentary secretary. I do agree with him that this is a matter that we do not want to dilly-dally on for too long. It is a relatively simple argument that I am about to make.
I am pleased to speak to this procedural motion, which outlines how the House of Commons will go about examining the tax framework that would allow provinces whose sales taxes are not harmonized to pursue harmonization if that is their wish.
The bill asks a very simple question of us all. I just said it is a very simple question so maybe the hon. member will get it the second time around. The question is: Do the provinces have the right to choose how they tax their citizens? That is a very simple question. Specifically, this motion asks if provinces have a right to harmonize their sales taxes with the federal goods and services tax.
It is important to note that seven provinces have already harmonized their sales taxes with the federal government, and none of the provinces that have harmonized have ever chosen to reverse their course and de-harmonize that tax.
In 1997 at the time of sales tax harmonization in Nova Scotia, the provincial NDP, led by Robert Chisholm, vowed that if the NDP were elected to govern, it would scrap the HST. Today it happens the NDP is the governing party in Nova Scotia, but interestingly, I have not heard NDP Premier Darrell Dexter indicate in any way that his government will de-harmonize the sales tax. In fact, the Nova Scotia NDP wants to retain Nova Scotia's harmonized sales tax. That is the choice of the Nova Scotia NDP government. We as federal politicians should respect the provincial NDP's choice to retain Nova Scotia's HST.
This year two other provinces have indicated that they would like to harmonize their sales taxes with the federal government just as other provincial governments had done during the 1990s. Now it will be up to us as the federal legislators of the 40th Parliament to decide if we will allow Ontario and British Columbia to harmonize their taxes in the same way that the 35th Canadian Parliament allowed the other provinces to do.
Should we allow provinces such as these to have a harmonized sales tax and not others? My answer to that would be clearly no. It is not the job of the federal government to give certain taxing powers to one province and to deny those same powers of taxation to other provinces. That is not how I believe our founders imagined Confederation would unfold and it is certainly not how I believe it should unfold.
It is a very simple principle and it is one that we must decide is either right or wrong. While the NDP will try to paint the bill as thousands of things that it is not for political gain, this is the essential principle that at the end of the day we will all have to decide if we support or reject.
There are certainly arguments to be made on both sides on the merits of the harmonized sales tax, and generally speaking those arguments should rightly be made in the provincial legislatures. What we in Ottawa must not do is to deny those legislatures the ability to have that discussion or make those decisions.
In terms of the benefits of harmonization, there are reports from Jack Mintz and others that have indicated harmonization will lead to gains in investment, productivity, wages and jobs. Mintz, for example, suggested harmonization in Ontario could over five years create some 500,000 jobs. In a province that has seen manufacturing jobs hammered by the Canada-wide Conservative recession, this is certainly good news.
There is, of course, also concern about increased costs on certain items, and people with those concerns have certainly made them--