Madam Speaker, first I would like to apologize for missing my rotation and I am grateful for having the opportunity to come back on. I would like to begin by saying that I probably would agree with the intent of the motion of the Bloc Quebecois although we are probably going to come at it from a different angle.
I come at it from the angle that government does not create jobs. Every time I hear this term job creation by somebody in government it is almost like running a fingernail down a chalkboard as far as I am concerned. Government does not create jobs. What government can do however is facilitate the creation of jobs.
I have lived in the northwest of British Columbia for all my life and for many years I was the partner in a construction business in northwestern British Columbia. It was a successful business. We started in 1981-82 with five employees and when we sold the business in 1990 we were employing up to 200 people at various times of the year.
We did this without any government grants, any handouts, any subsidies. As a matter of fact, and I say this with all sincerity, we did it in spite of government, not with any government help.
I have also been involved in the business community in Kitimat for many years with the Chamber of Commerce and many of my good friends and acquaintances come from the business community. Of course as a community we often associate and we talk about the various problems we face in our businesses and the various things that hinder or help us.
I can assure everyone that virtually all of the business contacts I have do not look at government as being some kind of boon to their existence. As a matter of fact they share the feelings I have that if government would only get off their backs and leave them alone they would have a lot better opportunity to create jobs or expand their businesses, to be profitable, to grow and to prosper.
I have some examples of the failure of government policies, some anecdotal evidence, that maybe some of the members here would be interested in.
Back in the early 1980s we contracted on the construction of a road that the federal government had put out for tender. In the contracting business when you submit a tender you are locked in. Your price is fixed. If your price is accepted then you are obligated to complete that job or project for the price you tendered.
At the time we were bidding the job there was no federal sales tax on explosives. Historically it had not been included. For whatever reason it had never been a part of the federal sales tax regime.
We bid the job. We got prices for explosives because it was a major component of the job and subsequent to submitting our tender and being awarded the job, but before we even got started on the project, the finance minister of the day came along and imposed a federal sales tax on explosives. We immediately went back and said to the minister that we were working for him, the government. We fixed the price to do this job, and after we fixed our price he had come along and increased our costs by $50,000 and we thought we ought to be able to get that back.
Do you think the government would do it? This was a Liberal government I might add. It was not the Conservative government. We never had any success.
These are the kinds of problems businesses come up against. Let me give you some more examples of government intervention in the marketplace.
For many years there was a successful ready-mix business operated in my community and that ready-mix business as part of its operation had a small block plant. On rainy days when there was nothing else to do the employees, rather than being sent home, would manufacture masonry blocks.
There was a fellow in a neighbouring community who got the bright idea that he should be in the block business. He secured a $700,000 loan or a loan guarantee from the federal government to put his business into operation, to create a huge block plant that could not possibly ever sustain itself for the market area it was trying to service. He drove the fellow in Kitimat out of business. His block plant had to close down. The employees lost the benefit of employment on rainy days when there was nothing left to do. In the end the new business failed simply because it was not a good business idea in the first place. If it had been a good business idea I suggest that he would not have had the problem in coming up with the funds.
Any time the government gets involved with funding these kinds of operations it is generally because it is a bad business idea. It is generally destined to fail. Not only are the taxpayers hurt but usually the competitors of that business are hurt. They are the ones that are contributing to the tax base. In effect their tax dollars are being used to support these businesses that are built up to compete against them.
These are the kinds of federal policies that we have had to live with in the business community in the past. When I hear about job creation it just does not ring true with me.
Let me give a most recent example. In the House today we were talking about a subsidy on the part of the government for a new aluminium smelter in South Africa, a $60 million U.S. dollar or close to a $100 million Canadian export credit to a new South African aluminium smelter. If the government is talking about job creation they must be interested in creating jobs in South Africa but certainly not here.
We have 10,000 people in Quebec who are employed directly in the primary production of aluminium and 2,000 people employed in British Columbia in my riding at Kitimat in one of Alcan's largest smelters anywhere. These people are paying their taxes and contributing to Canadian society and they see their taxes being used to support the construction of a new aluminium smelter in South Africa. How are we creating jobs in Canada by that measure? Where is the consistency in government? I just do not see it.
Some of the irritants and costly policies that government follow are that small businesses in Canada are acting as the agent of the government in collecting taxes, UIC premiums, CPP premiums and personal employment data. As well as being an unpaid job, the fact is they are liable for any mistakes they might make. They are liable for doing the government's work for them. In addition to acting as an agent they have to make payroll deductions and remit that money on a regular basis. In the case of my business it was on the 15th of each month. In the past we had to have our cheques postmarked by the 15th of the month so that we would avoid penalties and interest.
Now the government that talks about aiding small business wants to have electronic transfers of those funds on the 15th of the month. If you do not get your electronic transfer done in time you are going to be faced with a 10 per cent penalty right off the bat let alone the interest charges. Now I ask, how is that assisting or helping small business?
This policy is tantamount to paying taxes in advance. When I was in business we had to meet our payroll and pay our expenses often long in advance of receiving the revenues that were attached to those expenses. I do not think the government fundamentally recognizes just how difficult it is.
It is one thing to talk about job creation and how we are going to assist small business, but it is quite another thing to sit there on a Thursday afternoon and try to make sure you are going to be able to cover your payroll on Friday. That is something that small business right across Canada has to face all the time and it is something that we in government-and I include myself now because I have become part of the guilty as it were-all too often fail to recognize. It is an extremely difficult existence out there for small business.
A small business person does not get a pension plan. They can maybe make use of the registered retirement savings plan but they do not have their own pension plan. They are not entitled to unemployment insurance benefits if their business fails. Oftentimes they are putting in 60, 70 or 80 hours a week and not receiving benefits. Many people who are working in regular jobs would be surprised. I think a lot of times people expect that entrepreneurs in small and medium sized businesses are very wealthy. The case is really that very few people actually become fabulously wealthy and successful. Most people just make a living at it and as a government we have to recognize that.
I have seen no evidence to this point that the government is taking any steps to rectify the problems that business faces. Taxation rules for example, are becoming more complex rather than simpler. I recall that when I was in business I looked at the tax act on a couple of occasions and neither myself, my accountant or my lawyer could not figure out what it meant.
How can we expect small business to be able to prosper when it has to deal with ambiguous tax laws? When you are trying to make a business decision on the best way to acquire a new asset or to open a new business, you have to spend all your time trying to figure out the best way to do it taxwise rather than getting on with the job and letting your entrepreneurial talents run toward creating the business and making it work. That is the kind of thing that government can do for small businesses, make it easier for them to exist.
Diversification funding, regional development funding and all the things I talked about earlier are still very much alive and it is still very much the attitude of members opposite that this is the way we are going to help business and industry. It is not.
As long as government prevails with this attitude, we are going to have a continual drain on tax dollars, we are going to have continual failures in the individual areas where these moneys are invested and it is going to hinder rather than help small business. While the Bloc is talking about no vision for the future, my vision is to get government out of these things and let small business prosper on its own.
I am going to conclude my remarks by saying that there is an opportunity right now for government to show leadership, to change some of the policies it has been following, to recognize that government does not create jobs, government does not create wealth. It certainly has the ability to expropriate wealth and it does that with remarkable ability.
The only jobs that government ever creates are jobs that are created as a result of the expropriation of somebody else's wealth in the first place. We have to recognize that. When government does recognize that-
