The gentleman across the way asked if that is a bad thing. It is a bad thing if the Canadian public does not know what he is doing and if he has been fooling around with his assets for the last two years so that he is getting a benefit that the Canadian public is not aware of. We are supposed to list those kinds of things, and Canadians are supposed to be aware of them.
Yesterday at the press conference, the Prime Minister himself would not let the finance minister answer questions. It starts to look like someone is guilty of something.
The Prime Minister is not exactly lily-white in this whole situation either. Lately, he has been bragging about how someone else manages and controls his family fortune. We certainly hope that is so and that the Prime Minister holds himself to a higher standard than he has allowed the finance minister to hold.
From the beginning the Prime Minister said that the government did not want to see or smell corruption anywhere. Right or wrong, from the very beginning we have questioned the ethics of the government. The Prime Minister has been in the middle of it from when he took his family with him to state dinners and left his ministers at home. A natural resource crisis with softwood lumber is going on but he leaves the minister at home, because he wants to take his in-laws with him to a state dinner.
There are numerous examples we can use. How about the one last Christmas? The Prime Minister went to a billionaire's island. I would say he got a personal benefit. The ethics code does not allow us to get a personal benefit from our position and the opportunities that we have. I would say that taking a private jet to a private island and spending 10 days there enjoying someone's hospitality in a fancy resort would be a private benefit. We have not heard anything yet whether that was in fact some sort of violation of the code, so why are we surprised when other cabinet ministers start dabbling as well?
We can talk about office renovations and their cost. When new ministers decide they will spend $600,000 or $800,000 on an office renovation, it does not matter because the tone is being set by the Prime Minister and his finance minister in the government. The Prime Minister claimed that the Liberals were going to be clean and accountable. We are just not seeing that.
It seems to be the way the government is that if it can find a loophole, it will take advantage of it and move through it. That is okay to it and there is no problem as long as it can find the loophole and squeeze through it. The problem is that the Liberals treat everyone else differently. When they start talking about regular people being tax cheats for using using corporate structures not to pay taxes, we know they are treating them differently from themselves.
I want to take a short look at the history of this government. I have talked a bit about some of the things it has done and the ethical standards it has failed to set up. The Liberals continue to mislead Canadians about the consequences of the tax cuts, but I would like to talk about the last six weeks in particular and the approach they have taken to Canadians.
The Liberals accused Canadians of being tax cheats, the people who have used some sort of corporate structure for their small businesses or their farms at a time when the Prime Minister and finance minister have had their own trusts. However, we found out they have foreign corporations in Barbados and France. Would they be putting those corporations in place if they were not trying to avoid Canadian taxes? I doubt it.
With its last approach to tax policy, the Liberal government has dragged millions of Canadians into a situation wherein they will face increased taxes. It is an attack on small companies, private business, employees, and agriculture. We know the details. Private investment is being taxed at levels of up to 73%. That is what the Liberals were proposing. They said, “Okay, we have got income sharing going on in small companies. We have to stop that. Well, if we can't stop it, we are going to go in and are going to make sure we spend time with these people to see if they are actually doing the work they claim they are doing.”
Are the Liberals serious? Are they going to put in place a reasonable test that will result in inspectors being on farms? Most of the people who work for the government cannot even come close to working the hours that farmers and their spouses work on their own operations.
In addition, the government talked about capital gains changes that would basically make it cheaper for people to sell their assets to a stranger than to their own children. Now, we hear it is backing off from that. The only reason it is backing off is the pressure it has been put under by this side of the House and Canadians across Canada.
The Liberal government threw out a little tiny promise it made, refusing to keep it for two years until it was in big trouble. Then it decided to move ahead with a tax break that was in place two years ago, but which it chose to disregard and remove, and now it wants to put it back in.
Canadians are supposed to treat this policy and the government seriously. It will not work, as people are starting to see through the government. They are starting to see its arrogance and sense of entitlement. As well, they are starting to smell something even worse, which is a deep-rooted sense of corruption in the government.