Brian Fitzpatrick

[Income Tax Act, September 24th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, an area no doubt with which the parliamentary secretary would be familiar and would be able to answer but which I would like clarification on is a lot of the resource sector and the energy sector have been converted into income trusts. I wonder if the member could enlighten the House as to whether these rules would apply to income trusts. They have become quite dominant in the resource sector and they are a totally different type of entity from a limited company or a publicly traded company.

[Taxation, September 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, she should come out to Saskatchewan and speak to the president of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League and just say what she is saying now.

Mr. Speaker, Saskatchewan has a strong amateur junior hockey tradition, as you know. Hockey is our national sport. The winters will be very long and cold if the minister kills amateur junior hockey in rural Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan simply wants to be treated fairly and equally. What is the government doing about this shameful case of discrimination?

[Taxation, September 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, sadly, federal tax collectors are in the process, as we speak, of bankrupting junior amateur hockey teams in Saskatchewan. By treating players' room and board and $100 per month expense money as income, they are literally killing hockey dreams. At the same time they have totally ignored junior A teams in other provinces.

Why is the tax collection system discriminating against Saskatchewan amateur junior hockey?

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, September 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Canadian Alliance supports this bill in principle. We believe the technology is there to allow seats to be updated for elections. We should be in tune with those things.

I did want to make a comment, however, on the speech I heard from the Bloc member today opposing the bill. I have a whole lot of difficulty with that point of view. The argument was that somehow Quebec was being left behind because of this bill. I guess in a democracy when representation is based on population we have to ask, is this bill the cause of the problem that we have in Quebec with the representation that the member was talking about? Is this the cause of it?

No, that is not the answer to the question. The answer is quite simply that that province has been preoccupied for the last 20 years with its fight for separatism. During that period of time the City of Montreal has lost its status in the country as our premiere city. Hockey teams have left the province. A baseball team is talking about leaving the province. Quebeckers are moving out of that province and the province is at a standstill. But also the governments that have been running that province have been socialistic governments. They have been preoccupied with big government, big spending, interfering in a major way in the day-to-day lives of people. And then they are surprised that their province has not gone anywhere and somehow this electoral boundaries issue is the reason why they are under-represented.

I think they are the author of their own misfortune. They should look in the mirror and they will find the reason why their province has not grown the way it should have. But hopefully they have turned a new leaf in that province and the province will be heading into growth.

For curiosity's sake I checked it out, Bloc members pay $10,000 more tax than Alberta MPs on their salaries. They pay $7,500 more in tax than Ontario MPs. A lot of members from the Bloc should be looking at Alberta and Ontario for the answer to their problems for a province that is growing sideways or backward and find a way to get the province jump-started and growing.

I want to raise another issue. We have had electoral financing debated in the House. We are dealing with boundaries now. That is an electoral reform as well. Speeding up that process and something that I feel very strongly about and that has been missing in this whole process is that most democracies legislate when elections are called.

In our country, the government wants to time the market. Liberals want the Prime Minister to have that ability to pick the optimal time for their own re-election. They do not want to legislate that sort of thing. Basically, if the legislation had dealt with this matter, and set terms and legislated the times for elections, we would not be involved with trying to push this through so the incoming Prime Minister would have the option to look at the most optimal period of time to call an election for his own best interest instead of the best interest for the country.

However, like all market timing, it has many perils and difficulties too and I suspect in this case the market timing measures that the government is looking at will backfire.

I want to comment about something that occurred in Saskatchewan in redrawing the boundaries. It is a point of contention that I have with the procedure that was employed in Saskatchewan. The whole process started with a dramatic alteration of the boundaries. The two major urban areas went from eight mixed ridings, rural-urban, to six urban ridings. Contrary to the Supreme Court ruling that basically said rural ridings should be the areas that have lower populations because it is tough to get fair and effective representation in a rural area because of its size and so on. They should have smaller seats in terms of population than urban areas.

This one started out with urban seats having 65,000 people and rural seats having 73,000 and 74,000 people. That is clearly contrary to the Supreme Court decision that dealt with this matter.

I tried to figure out how this proposed boundary in Saskatchewan got going and I certainly hit a stone wall. The member for Wascana, the Minister of Public Works, was an enthusiastic supporter of those boundaries. The member for Regina—Qu'Appelle, an NDP member, was also an enthusiastic supporter of that proposed boundary.

If we look at the last election results, it is interesting to see that both of those members received very poor support from the rural areas. In fact the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle almost lost his seat it was so narrow. It seems rather strange to me that we would create urban seats that fly in the face of the Supreme Court of Canada decision and create rural seats that just do not make any sense.

Fortunately, I have to give the commission credit. Mr. Justice Bayntonand the two appointees on the commission looked through all this stuff and listened to the people of those ridings. They went back to the original 14 seats that were only done in 1997. We had a million people in Saskatchewan then and we have a million today. Nothing had really changed in the demographics in the province.

The commission went back to the original boundaries, much to the disappointment I am sure of the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle and the member for Wascana, because they still have to deal with all the rural people who do not particularly like a lot of their policies and stands on things, such as the vote we had yesterday in the House of Commons. I know in rural Saskatchewan that is going to go over like a lead balloon with those folks. They will have to pay for it in the next election. They did not want that.

They wanted to dump all those rural people, get them off their backs and try to get a small urban seat that they thought they could manage their way through for another election. That is not going to happen. That whole strategy on their part is going to backfire and I am really looking forward to that day when the chickens come home to roost for those two members.

[Main Estimates 2003-04, June 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in addressing this transportation issue, there is an observation that I want to make. The government calls itself Liberal, but quite often when we peel back liberalism, what we have is a new form of socialism. I know that the member from P.E.I. would like that kind of talk. It means more government, more central planning, more spending, more bureaucracy, more interference in the economy, and more interference in the day-to-day lives of Canadians. That is the Liberal way more often than not.

The transportation sector is a good sector to look at when we look at the Liberal way. Anything that the Liberal government puts its hands on, it seems to turn it to rock. The airline industry in this country is in a shambles with the government's interference and the way it dealt with that area. Air Canada, the one airline that the government has been most active in getting involved with and helping out, is an absolute disaster.

I hear Liberals on the other side of the House talk as if, when they spend money, it is free money. That is a totally false concept. There are independent economists who have looked at government spending and in this country estimate that the cost to the private sector for every dollar extracted by the Liberal government is $2 in economic output. We lose two dollars for every dollar the government collects. We had better get some real value when the government spends money because I do not see it.

There is a cost of working this money through the bureaucracy, from the CCRA right through the bureaucracy, until it gets out the other end. Some people have estimated that 34¢ out of every tax dollar is absorbed in that system alone too. So this is no minor issue.

VIA Rail receives a huge subsidy from the government, a half a million dollars a day. It is competing against private sector bus lines and small short line rails throughout the system. It is also competing against this troubled airline industry. I have small air services in my riding in Prince Albert and I have talked to these individuals. This Liberal way has been absolutely disastrous for them. The $24 air security tax has been a killer. The Nav Canada burdens that are being imposed on these individuals are just killing those businesses and driving them out of business. This is the Liberal way. It likes to crowd out healthy, promising businesses and replace them with government-run systems.

I want to make it clear that commuter service in this country works fairly well where we have high density populations with all of the arguments about environmental concerns, deficiency, and viability. We do not need the government to do this. This is happening without the government. A confused commuter service, with this bloated VIA Rail, is really off the mark.

Obviously one of the solutions of this VIA Rail thing would be to do what the government once did. I believe it was Mr. Young, when he was the minister, who took the bull by horns with CN. CN was an albatross for this country because we were constantly subsidizing it and it provided lousy service. It had been in and out of taxpayers' pockets for years. He privatized CN and turned into probably the most successful rail system in North America, or probably the world. It was a shining example of the private sector. It provided better service and a better network than the government owned operation.

It still bothers me that the government is subsidizing an inefficient service that people are not choosing to use, except for the odd person who wants to take a holiday at the expense of everybody else at a huge subsidy.

There are lots of other ways to travel across this great country besides rail but we have to subsidize it because members on that side have some warm and fuzzy feeling about the railroad. They have probably read Pierre Berton's book The Last Spike and think that because it is VIA Rail the government has to stay in there and hold the thing together.

VIA Rail only serves a very small fraction of the country. People who travel across the country use motor vehicles, the buses and the airlines. It is a big country but VIA Rail only serves a small slice of it. At a half a million dollars a day we have to really wonder on a cost benefit analysis why we do not wake up to the fact that the plug should be pulled on this service. We should use that money for much more important things such as improving the infrastructure of our roads and highways across the country.

Even the gas tax motion that we debated earlier ties in with this. The government's priorities on spending and using tax dollars and so on in so many areas is an absolute disaster. It is really unfortunate. On random polls, the Liberals seem to have 40% to 50% of the people's vote. I wish a lot of people would wake up and realize what the government's policies are doing to our economy and the future of this nation.

Nine million dollars is a small matter. However, I want to emphasize that we elected 301 members of Parliament. The people entrusted us with the job. Those folks on the committee studied and looked hard at VIA Rail and came up with a proposal that would reduce the spending by $9 million and what happened? The elected elite dictatorship bureaucracy that runs this place walked in and found ways to override what that committee decided to do.

Government would be much better served to listen to what the committee members are suggesting and recommending. We would get better public policy and better government. But there are those in that elite element in government who believe they have to have control, and that it has to be centralized control. They have to plan everything. They are going to find the ways to waste our taxpayers' dollars and regulate us into the ground. They just do not want to let that go.

It is really dangerous if they see some Liberal backbenchers on the committees get a little bit of insight on positive ways of developing good policy. It bothers them that the door might open a bit and the whole system might come crumbling down upon them, which would really be good if it happened.

I congratulate the member from the Kootenays. I listened to his speech and I know what he has had to say on transportation issues and the VIA Rail. He is right on the mark. I wish some of my Liberal friends would spend more time listening to common sense like that instead of looking down and reading their notes and papers, or whatever it is that they do.

[Supply, June 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to bring a Saskatchewan perspective to this discussion and probably one from Manitoba as well. I remember that a few years ago the president of Agricore United was appalled at the huge amount of money that the federal government was extracting out of the agricultural communities of Manitoba and Saskatchewan because of their high dependency on transportation and the use of gasoline and diesel fuel. It was a huge amount, a disproportionate amount, and virtually nothing ever came back to those rural transportation systems.

I know that feeling. Where I come from, when the people talk about a national infrastructure program they think of pork barrel politics, helping out Liberal friends, or spending east of Ontario. That is what the people in my part of the world tend to think. They are very suspicious of any federal government program.

I have a question for the member from Alberta who gave such a good speech on this topic. Is it preferable on a user pay principle to give the taxing power back to the provinces, which I think under the Constitution is where it should be under section 92, direct taxes, or is it better to let some big federal bureaucracy dominated by Liberals decide how infrastructure money is allocated across the country?

[Supply, June 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, that was an excellent speech by my Canadian Alliance colleague from British Columbia who is an excellent MP.

The government has this 10 year infrastructure program. I come from Saskatchewan and, generally speaking, it seems to me that the federal government is invisible in that province with its programs. The government seems to fly right over the province.

My concern with the 10 year project that the government is talking about is whether there will be some equitable distribution of funding to the provinces from coast to coast with the program. Would my colleague comment on whether he has any knowledge about how this program will be administered? Will it be fair and equitable to all the regions and all the provinces of the country?

[Supply, June 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to the member's speech. I am in serious disagreement with one point. Provincial governments are democratically elected. Most people, whether the hon. member agrees with it, look primarily to the provincial government as the government that delivers the programs and services that mean something to them.

The other thing he implied in his speech is that the federal government does a better job of managing things. Let us take some exclusive areas of federal jurisdiction, such as the fisheries. We almost have more people involved in the fisheries today than we have fishers, and the fisheries are almost dead. Let as look at aboriginal policy, national defence, Air Canada and the air transportation system across the country. Let us look at our national parks. The roads are terrible. The drinking water on our reserves is pathetic. These are areas of exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government.

Why does the member and his party always knock the democratically elected provincial governments, with which most people feel far more comfortable than this four year elected dictatorship under the Liberal regime?

[Supply, June 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am still not sure whether or not the parliamentary secretary is in favour of our motion today. It seems like the member for LaSalle—Émard is in favour of our motion. At the creative cities conference on May 29, 2003, the former finance minister said:

Many cities have suggested that having access to a portion of the revenues generated by the gas tax would be of significant help in making their budgets more reliable and predictable.

It seems like the former finance minister would be supportive of our motion. I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary whether or not he wants to line up with the Canadian Alliance and perhaps the Prime Minister in waiting to make some of the gas taxes that the federal government collects available to the provinces and municipalities so that they can build their infrastructure, and stop building sports boxes in sports stadiums across Canada in the name of infrastructure?

[Supply, June 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am confused with some of the comments.

The implication of the previous question implies that the federal government is a terrific success at whatever it does. I look at things such as defence, security, Air Canada, firearms registration, aboriginal policy, the pension system, et cetera. I really do not know where the Liberals get their enthusiasm because I certainly do not share it with them.

I do want to pose a question to the member from Kamloops. Her speech was very much on point. I come from the province of Saskatchewan. Our economy is dispersed throughout the province. We have roads from one end to the other. There are only a million people in Saskatchewan. We are dependent on gasoline and diesel fuel to move product out of Saskatchewan. It is a big burden in our province and our highway system is a big burden.

If I hear the prime minister in waiting correctly, he wants to invent this great big urban bureaucracy to spend money in infrastructure in the urban areas. It seems to me that the more common sense approach is the Canadian Alliance motion, given the capacity to provide proper infrastructure and not create another huge federal government bureaucracy. What is the member's reaction to--