Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague and friend, the member for Shefford.
Eliminating the goods and services tax, or GST, on diapers and children's clothing is great and should be made permanent. However, we have serious reservations when the government says it is going to eliminate the GST on champagne and fancy restaurants, where only the rich can afford to go.
In fact, the proposed measure seems to benefit the rich more than anyone else. As we know, lower-income people pay rent, which is not taxed. At the grocery store, they buy staples, which are already tax-free. That leaves heating, and the government did not want to remove the taxes on heating in this bill. This means that the wealthy are the ones who will save money thanks to the gifts presented here.
On top of that, retailers are not happy with the measure because it involves huge costs, thousands and thousands of dollars to make the changes not once, but twice. This is a huge expense for temporary populist measures.
What is more, the way the government is going about this is unprecedented in the House. It is proposing a measure that will last for only two months and imposing a major gag order. We were only able to review the content of the bill just a few hours before debating it in the House. We were told that we will not be able to amend it or to examine it in committee. That is really unacceptable.
The government is really out of steam. It is tired and trying anything it can. It is giving people a little pre-election Christmas gift. That is called taking people for fools. When this government took office, it said that it wanted to do things differently. Quite frankly, it has become just as cynical as all of the other governments. This is a petty government. What it is doing is really petty.
I will now return to SMEs and small businesses. They are reaching out and telling us that they are worried. The adjustment costs are very high and can amount to several thousand, if not tens of thousands, of dollars per business. Small businesses can never earn that money back through the extra sales they stand to make. They have to check their entire product list, to make sure that products are correctly identified, and then pay their employees overtime wages for that. This involves recalibrating machinery, cash registers, and so on. The technicians needed to perform this work are already scarce, and recalibrating these machines is said to cost about $4,000.
For the big players, like Walmart, which have to regularly recalibrate their machinery and recheck their prices, this is no big deal. They have the necessary financial means and they can adjust. It is a different story for small businesses, however, and the bill makes no provision for any compensation to help them in that regard.
I will give some examples. The owner of a small business that offers accommodation told us he was closing his business for those two months. He calculated the cost of keeping his business open during the holidays and during the two months and he calculated the cost of adapting to the measure. To minimize the losses, the owner decided to close his business that offers accommodation. Also, a bar owner said that he knew that the measure applied to restaurants, but he hoped that bars would be exempt because he really did not feel like going through this.
As I was saying, in Quebec, every business, restaurant and bar will have to hire a technician to recalibrate the point of sale machines for January 1, because that is when tip options on the machines will have to be calculated before tax. They will already have to bring in a technician for that, but now they will also have to bring one in on December 14 and on Valentine's Day, two months later. The technician will have to come three times. As I was saying, there is a shortage of technicians. Obviously, the government never thought of that. It never thought about consulting anyone to see how these things work. Such is the government's way. The business owners are going to have to bring in technicians three times.
That same bar owner said his price for a pint of beer was $7.50. If the government takes the GST off, he is not going to lower his price to $7.22 or $7.15. The price will still be $7.50, and he will pocket the 5%. However, he does not want this to happen at all, because he wants to avoid all the headaches it will cause him. He gave another example. There will be no tax on drinks containing less than 7% alcohol, but drinks containing more than 7% will continue to be taxed. He will have to do an inventory of all his drinks and all his receipts to see what is taxed and what is not. He will have to do all that for an exemption that will last only two months.
He also talked about the following big problem. When he makes a bloody caesar, he uses one ounce of vodka and some juice. When he adds a lot of ice, the alcohol content is under 7%, but when he does not use a lot of ice, it will be higher than 7%. He does not know what he should do. He is going to pocket the GST because he does not want to lower his prices. He does not want this measure, because he thinks it is ridiculous and way too much of a hassle. It is unprecedented to go to so much trouble for two months. This government is really tired and on its last legs, so it is willing to try pretty much anything.
I have another example. Children's clothing is fine. The bill says that it must be for children under 14. If someone has a teenager under 14 who is tall and needs adult clothing, they will have to pay the tax because their child is too tall. Obviously the Liberals have thought long and hard about this.
Other things to mention include all the costs to the provinces. I will start with Quebec. We know that the QST, the Quebec sales tax, is based on the sale price, which has the GST added to it. If there is no GST for two months, the QST would be calculated on a smaller amount. Should Quebec also draft a whole bill to compensate for that loss? Obviously, that is not going to happen. There is going to be a shortfall. I imagine that, in its great wisdom, the federal government called the Quebec government to say that it would compensate for this shortfall, which I estimate at between $30 million and $40 million. No, it did not think of that either. This is a government that writes its bills at the last minute, on the back of a napkin. It is a real mess.
What is more, as we know, Ottawa pays Revenu Québec to collect GST on Ottawa's behalf. Ottawa gives Revenu Québec money. Given that all of the adjustment costs will be additional costs for Revenu Québec, I would imagine that Ottawa would have acted the gentleman and called Revenu Québec to offer it the necessary compensation before Revenu Québec had to ask, but no, there is nothing about that in the bill either, because the government does not look beyond the end of its tiny nose. We could say that it has a nose as long as Pinocchio's, but when it comes time to think about all of these applications, it does not look beyond the tiny nose of a petty government.
Worse still, for the five provinces that have the harmonized sales tax, or HST—Ontario and the four maritime provinces—it is Ottawa that collects the tax. Their tax level is the same as it is for the GST, so everything changes at once, everything is harmonized. With this bill, however, they have discovered that the provincial sales tax, for example in Ontario, will be zero for two months. Understandably, Doug Ford seems to agree with the idea of lowering taxes on beer and was unwilling to lock horns with Ottawa. In provinces like Ontario, where the harmonized tax is 13%, if I am not mistaken, specifically 5% at the federal level and 8% at the provincial level, the province will still have to absorb the bulk of this measure’s cost, which will make it possible for people to buy bottles or cases of champagne to ring in the New Year. As if people who buy champagne really need such a gift. As for the major restaurants, the treasuries of those five provinces will bear the brunt of the cost, again without any consultation. In this particular case, I think that the government was trying to set a trap for the provinces and for the Conservatives, thinking that all this really makes no sense and that the Conservative Premier of Ontario would no doubt refuse to let anyone play around with his finances.
The government could have said that it wants to lower taxes, but it is the Conservatives who do not. Doug Ford and the provinces that have the HST did not fall into the trap. Now, the government has to play the role of “Grandpa Ottawa” and claim that it is the one in charge of what the provinces do with their tax bases. It is outrageous, but that is what it comes down to.
I want to point out something else. I am thinking about all the businesses in the Outaouais and in Gatineau. Consumers will get a 13% tax holiday if they go to Ontario, but only 5% if they go to Quebec. Someone who wants to buy a big video game console tax-free, or a case of champagne, will go shopping in Ontario, which is just great for our retailers, who will have had to pay thousands of dollars to adapt only to see their sales drop, because the Liberals did not think of that either when they drew this up on the back of an envelope.
I would have liked to talk about the $250 cheques. They were in the first bill that we were told was going to be introduced, but it was such a mess, and there were so many mistakes in it, that they are left without a dance partner. They are no longer able to find a partner for this ploy to buy votes, which reminds me of the cheques that Stephen Harper sent to families in the summer of 2015; we all saw how that turned out. Most of all, these measures remind me of Maurice Duplessis, who gave fridges to his constituents so that they would vote for him. The government thinks that by giving us cheques and a GST holiday that we will vote for them. Do they take us for fools?