Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity. This is my first experience here with closure.
I have followed politics quite carefully and closely for a long period of time. I remember when the Liberal government used to invoke closure, the Conservatives were up in arms, screaming like banshees about it. I certainly did not get that sense today, that they were outraged by putting that forward.
The interesting thing is that the HST, plainly put, is the wrong tax at the wrong time. I want to give a couple of examples from my riding, people I have talked to, but I also want to debunk a couple of things that the government is saying, along with the McGuinty government in Ontario, is good for the HST.
The government is saying this is really good for small businesses. It is good for small businesses because they are going to be able to get all their inputs back. The fact of the matter in Ontario is that most small- and medium sized businesses have very few inputs that have PST on them right now. So the argument is false.
To presume from that, that it is going to create, and I think the quote has been from the Premier of Ontario, 600,000 new jobs is just the opposite. I have a small business. I know many people and have talked to many people who have small businesses, and not one of them has said that they are going to be hiring somebody because of HST. In fact, it is just the opposite.
Before I get too much further, I would like to say that I will be splitting my time with the member for Vancouver East. I forgot to say that at the beginning, and I hope that it is still acceptable.
I want to give a couple of examples. I will give an example of a gentleman in my riding, and I will not use his name, who says that this tax is certainly going to put him under. This kind of tax at this time, in a recessionary time, means that those who spend most or all of their income every month to survive are no longer going to be able to even survive month to month. That is a real problem.
I spoke to an elderly gentleman in Atikokan, which is right in the middle of my riding. The riding has had its share of troubles over the years since the mines closed in the early 1980s. He came to me and said he could not pay his electricity bill. Keep in mind, he is in his mid-80s or so. He worked all his life. He raised his family. His children are gone and his wife has passed away. He owned his house about 30 years ago or so and he is on a fixed income.
He says, “I cannot pay my electricity bill, and I do not know what to do”. If he cannot pay his electricity bill, what is he going to do when he gets another 8% on his electricity bill, when he gets another 8% on his home heating fuel, or when he gets another 8% on his gasoline purchase? I do not think he drives anymore, so that is not an issue.
He also told me, “I do not know why I cannot pay my electricity bill now because I have one light bulb in my house. I use one light bulb in my house, and every three or four days I turn my refrigerator off and then on again. That is all the electricity I use”.
Now, there is a combination of reasons for that, that do not concern the government, and it happens to be things that Mr. McGuinty has done, smart metres and a couple of other things have started to put daily expenses out of reach for this gentleman, but he is not the only one. I have talked to plenty of seniors and other people on fixed incomes who are having real trouble with HST.
I will give another example. In Emo, in the west end of my riding, we have a number of people who depend on the tourism industry. They have resorts. In this particular case, a gentleman from Emo and his family have run this resort for 35 years. I believe it was his father's before him. The way resorts work, the way the business works, and I am sure everyone in the House will agree with me, is they plow that money back into the business every year to build that business. They do not think about retirement. The only retirement they think about, when they are in the resort tourism business, is that someday they are going to be able to sell that resort, and that is going to be their retirement.
He came to me in Fort Frances and said that he cannot sell his resort; there is no one around who wants to buy it. He said his business is down 50%. There are a combination of factors, and I will briefly describe them.
Two years ago the Ontario government made him get a professional survey for his out-camp. He has a regular resort and then he has an out-camp hundreds of kilometres further north, where he takes people fishing. He had to get a professional survey at his own expense. He did that. The next year he was charged property tax.
That was really tough for him, because he was paying property tax on an out-camp. Why do we pay property tax? It is because we get services. When his place burns down, I am not sure who is going to put the fire out in that out-camp. He does not get any services, so he has been hit again. This time he is going to be hit with 8% HST. There will be some more percentage points on each bed he has.
Let us not always think about 8%, because at this time that flight from his resort to his out-camp has no tax on it at all. He will be charging 13% to tourists, most of them American, to send them to those camps, and his business is down 50%.
He said he would have to go down to Iowa this winter, set up his table and try to get business at the trade shows. Right beside him is going to be a resort owner from Manitoba. The fish in Manitoba and northern Ontario are not that much different. He said he would be standing beside a fellow from Manitoba who will be able to undersell him by $1,100 to $1,500 for any package he can offer. He fully expects that in 2010 business will be down another 50%.
Members will remember my opening comments. Resort owners who deal with tourists plow every cent back into their businesses, as do owners of many small businesses and many medium-sized businesses. They look to retirement when they can sell their resort; that becomes their retirement nest egg. Mr. Speaker, this gentleman is not going to have that retirement nest egg because he is being priced right out of business in northwestern Ontario, and HST is just the latest.
There are couple of other interesting things that the Conservative government and the Ontario government talk about when they say that the HST is going to be good for us. One is that they say it is good for investment. That is an interesting statement. If we compare a tax on profits, which would be the normal way of doing things, and this kind of value-added tax, I am not sure we are going to see any investment; we have high unemployment, and more than 50% of the people in Ontario are not even figured into the unemployment figures because either they have given up or moved, or their benefits have lapsed.
The most heinous thing about HST and the government is that they are borrowing $4.3 billion. This is not money the government has. It is borrowing $4.3 billion, and the cost of that extra over the next 10 years may be double. It may be $9 billion or $10 billion. They are borrowing $4.3 billion to bribe Ontario into bringing HST in. Ontario is going to send one-time cheques to everyone, cheques of $350 for single people and $900 or $1,000 to families. People in Ontario are going to be bribed with their own money, but it is not even their own money; it is money that the government must borrow to make HST happen.
It is also interesting that although Conservatives talk about money going back into the coffers, the Ontario Minister of Finance said that we will lose on this tax. We will not even make anything on this tax. My goodness, why is it coming here in the first place?