Madam Speaker, I am very proud as always to rise in the House representing the people of Timmins--James Bay and to rise in a place that is called the House of Commons. It is called the House of Commons because Parliament was set up to have a voice for the common people, so that the lords and the cronies and their pals could not simply lord over fundamental issues, one of them being taxation, taxation without representation. It was made up of common people who represented various regions.
People watching this back home see the New Democratic Party as being the one party in the House to speak about the issue before us, which is the Conservative government's attempt to take an unwanted tax out of the hide of senior citizens and people on fixed income.
The government does not have the guts nor the willingness to hear from senior citizens nor to hear from small business, so it brought forward a closure motion. We are not even debating the issue of the unwanted HST today. We are debating the fact that the Conservative government is shutting down debate on a bill that the public has not even seen.
Then we look at the Liberals' position. Well I could look at the Liberals, but they are all off at their Christmas eggnog parties. The Liberals say they cannot represent this issue in the House because if they do, the government might make them stay for the weekend and they are off to the beaches of Cuba.
The Liberals and the Conservatives both have one thing in common. Both parties think that by deep-sixing debate they can escape the sensor of the people of Ontario and British Columbia. This speaks to a deep malaise that exists in both the Liberal and Conservative Party. They think that the common people do not need to be heard.
I would like to quote an article in the Toronto Sun from the other day that actually spoke about this. It said :
The July 1 imposition of an unwanted Harmonized Sales Tax on millions of Canadians, which took another step forward on Parliament Hill yesterday, is a symbol of a growing malaise in Canadian politics. It's the increasing disconnection of Canada's political elite, both in the nation's capital and in the provinces, regardless of whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, from the people they are supposed to serve.
Conservative backbenchers think they are going to escape the judgment of average citizens on this issue because they are hiding behind this pathetic fig leaf, saying it is the provinces. It is not the provinces. This comes from the Mike Harris gang. This is the agenda of the finance minister. As the National Post said in early March of this year, “It was a pet project of the finance minister”.
People in Ontario will remember that gang and what the Mike Harris crew did. They were the ones who laughed when people were not able to feed their kids. They were the ones who told them to buy dented cans of tuna if they wanted to feed their families. They were the ones who demonized the poor. A woman who was nine months pregnant, who had received overpayments on her student loans, was considered such a criminal that she was put under house arrest and left to die. We heard nothing from that gang about what they were doing to the poor and to seniors. That is the Mike Harris gang.
That same gang is now in Ottawa. They are trying to pretend that the provinces are doing this, and yet in budget 2006 the finance minister said:
The Government invites all provinces that have not yet done so to engage in discussions on the harmonization of their provincial retail sales taxes with the federal GST.
On April 10, 2008, the finance minister, who was the right hand of Mike Harris, said:
--we're also calling on the remaining provinces that have not harmonized their PST with the GST to work with us to accomplish that goal of harmonization.
The National Post refers to this as being “the pet project of the finance minister”.
Just recently, members of the wonderful New Democratic government in Manitoba, who did not mind staying up late at night to debate a motion that affected their citizens, said that Manitoba was rejecting an invitation from the federal government to introduce a harmonized sales tax because, as proposed, the HST would impose more than $400 million in new sales tax costs on Manitoba families at a time of economic uncertainty.