Madam Speaker, I would like to rise in this House this afternoon to speak with my colleagues about Bill C-10 and, more specifically, the Group No. 1 amendments put forward by the Bloc Québécois. First of all, we would like to see clause 6 deleted as it permits the use of tax havens.
In a situation as critical as the one we are facing today, it is important to focus government intervention on the poorest among us, the people who truly need a helping hand in the economic sectors that are flagging and urgently in need of financial aid to make it through the current situation. Take, for instance, the forestry sector. These workers and businesses have been trying to make ends meet, trying to get on stable financial footing, for four years now.
As well, the Conservatives are not helping those who are newly unemployed. The Bloc Québécois proposed a simple measure to eliminate the two week waiting period for people who fall victim to unemployment so that they can immediately benefit from government support, a support system which they paid into when they were working.
Yesterday, here in this House, my colleague from Laval wanted to hold a debate on the status of women. In her speech, she said that eliminating the two-week waiting period could help many women. Yesterday, the new Liberal-Conservative alliance prevented that debate from taking place. I say “new alliance”, but as everyone knows and the Bloc Québécois has always said, Liberals and Conservatives are cut from the same cloth. We can really see this as we debate the budget. The Liberals decided to support the budget, without reading it, I imagine. Now, there is some criticism coming from the Liberal benches, but the damage is done. They decided to support this budget blindly.
It is clear that the Liberals and the Conservatives do not want to tackle the problems head-on and put in place all these measures to benefit unemployed workers and industries hard hit by the economic crisis. Instead, the finance minister is keeping all the systems that allow companies to use tax havens, depriving government coffers of tax money that would have come in handy at this time of crisis.
The minister is clearly trying to benefit his friends at the expense of our local businesses. Those friends are companies that benefit from this financial assistance and these tax havens. He wants to benefit people who likely asked him to. I will come back to that later. Members will be surprised to learn who was on the expert panel in charge of justifying this about-face by the minister.
I say “about-face”, because in his 2007 budget, the minister had said that everyone should pay their fair share of tax. Every time an individual or a company does not pay applicable tax, other taxpayers have to pony up. It is therefore clear that he had to come up with an excellent alibi to go back on what he had so rightly said in 2007. So he set up an advisory panel to review Canada's international tax system. Four of the people on the panel were from the private sector, including a former CEO of Scotiabank.
Need we say more? Scotiabank is the Canadian bank with the most branches in tax havens. If that is not a conflict of interest, it is definitely an apparent conflict of interest. As I was saying earlier, I find it at the very least peculiar that in this time of crisis, businesses are still being encouraged to use these strategies to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. We know very well that, especially now, any money that can be added to the federal coffers will be very important to support those who are most vulnerable in our society.
As a final point, I would like to talk about the older workers who are losing their jobs right now. How long have we been calling for a program for older worker adjustment? These people have worked their entire lives and cannot be retrained within a few years of their retirement. They have an urgent need for immediate help from the government through the insurance they have been paying into their entire working lives.
We would like another set of provisions to be eliminated: clauses 295 to 299. These clauses deal with the establishment of a single securities commission. At this point, it is unfortunate to hear the minister and members opposite tell us that the economic crisis dictates that we establish, from coast to coast, a single securities commission when we know very well that the Minister of Finance has been dreaming of this for a number of years, ever since his Toronto cronies asked him to concentrate Canadian economic activities in the Ontario metropolis. And once again, they decided to create a committee to examine this possibility. It is clear, since that was the minister's wish, that they had to come up with what is now in the bill: the establishment of a transition office.
The National Assembly of Quebec is unanimous on this issue: there must be no interference in Quebec's jurisdiction. Throughout the world, groups responsible for evaluating the performance of securities regulators have told us that Canada's system is above reproach and that it is one of the best in the world.
Why change what works? Why decide to turn upside down a system that works well and to initiate—that is the spirit of the bill—lawsuits if the provinces do not co-operate. It makes no sense to use the courts to voluntarily meddle in areas that are clearly the jurisdiction of Quebec and the provinces.
It is clear to the Bloc that clauses 6 and 295 through 299 must be struck from BillC-10. In this regard, I hope my colleagues have the foresight demonstrated by the Bloc since it arrived in this House.