Monte Solberg

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, March 23rd, 1998]

moved:

Motion No. 1

That Bill C-28 be amended, in Clause 178, by replacing lines 35 to 40 on page 315 with the following:

“Canada;”

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to stand today to debate Bill C-28, and in particular Motion No. 1

I should start by saying that I object to this bill on three grounds primarily.

First, it is a bill that discusses income tax without providing any tax relief for Canadians. Second, it is a bill that talks about income tax but does not provide people with a simplification of the tax codes, something that has become very confusing for many people. Finally, it is a bill that really typifies this government's aimless approach to dealing with the problems of the nation. It is a bill that really does major on the minors.

Specifically, Madam Speaker, let me speak to the motion that you have just read. This motion attempts to roll back what I believe is a real attack on the sovereignty of other levels of government by the federal government. Essentially what the government is proposing to do is to circumscribe the ability of municipalities to raise revenues for their constituents, for the people of their cities, villages and towns, through subsidiary corporations. There are many such organizations like that in Canada today.

I want to explain to the House and to people who are watching this via television why it is really important that municipalities continue to have the ability to raise these revenues without having them taxed by the federal government.

First, I want to point out that it was the federal government, going back to the 1993 election, which made a solemn commitment that it would not cut transfer payments to the provinces. During the leaders' debate we know that our current Prime Minister, when asked about cutting federal transfer payments for health care, said “I said yesterday, replying to Mr. Bouchard, that I promise they will not go down and I hope that we will be able to increase them”. The rest is history.

We know that the Prime Minister did not meet his commitment. He did not come anywhere close. In fact he cut transfer payments in total by about $6 billion. The result was that the provinces had $6 billion less money for health care and higher education.

What did they do? They had to find some way to save money as well, so they started to make cuts. One of the areas that was hit were the municipalities. Municipalities were hit and were unable, in many cases, to provide some of the services that they typically had been providing. At the same time the government was expecting them to pick up even more services. Traditional services which they used to fund, they were unable to fund. At the same time provincial governments were asking them to pick up new services. In fact the federal government was doing the same thing.

We now see in this particular piece of legislation, Bill C-28, the federal government proposing to tax another level of government, something which I think is wrong. I think it is incorrect, particularly when this level of government, which is the level of government closest to the people, the one that is best able to judge, the level of government that does the best job of delivering services, is being asked to pick up more of the load. It is wrong for the federal government to propose to take away revenues that they earn through their subsidiaries in their own municipalities. It is absolutely wrong, but that is precisely what the government is proposing to do.

That is not the end of it. The final point, and maybe the most important point, is that these taxes inevitably always are passed on to the consumer. We know that. Every member in this House knows it. We know that when corporations are taxed, those corporations pass taxes on to the consumer. That is precisely what will happen this time as well.

We know that this government has a penchant for raising taxes. We know that we have the highest personal income taxes in the G-7 already. They are 56% higher than the G-7 average. We know that if we were to be competitive with the United States in terms of tax levels we would have to have a tax cut in this country of over $35 billion.

I know my colleagues across the way will say that we must take into account what happened in the last budget, which reduced taxes by partially eliminating the 3% surtax. Indeed it did. But what they did not tell us in the budget is that they just finished increasing payroll taxes through the Canada pension plan premiums which people have to pay.

In fact, that tax increase will be the largest tax increase in Canadian history.

What the government does not talk about is the phenomenon of bracket creep, an inflation tax that happens every year. This year alone bracket creep will more than wipe out any tax relief that the government is proposing to give us through its reduction in the surtax. Eight hundred and eighty million dollars is what the government surtax would give Canadians in tax relief. On the other hand, bracket creep would take $1 billion out of their pockets. Canadians, just on that level alone, are coming out as net losers.

We say to our friends in the government that increasing taxes is not a way to help anybody. When are they going to learn? When are they going to figure that out? We have had 107 tax increases since the Tories and the Liberals came to power. We have staggering levels of taxation.

At the Liberal convention this weekend we heard Liberals saying that we must have tax relief. When is the government over there going to wake up and figure out that it is time for Canadians to have some tax relief? I am sick to death of seeing the government come up with new and creative ways to tax Canadians. That is essentially what it has done with this provision in Bill C-28. This is yet another sneaky, back door way of increasing taxes.

I hope my colleagues around the House, who are concerned about the government's trampling on other jurisdictions, understand that what the government is essentially doing is proposing to tax another level of government, proposing to invade its jurisdiction and to invade its sovereignty. That is wrong and it is unproductive. It does not help when we are trying to build and unite a nation. However, that is precisely what the government is doing.

I sat on the finance committee when this bill made its way through Parliament in the last Parliament. We heard a representative from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities who spoke against this particular provision because they could see what was going to happen. The government is again coming up with a new way to rip money out of taxpayers' pockets. It is wrong. We need to stand up against this sort of creeping taxation that the government has relied on to suck ever more money out of taxpayers' pockets.

I was looking through some documents a few minutes ago and noted that between 1993 and, according to the government's own projections, 1999 we will have seen federal income tax revenues rise by over 40%.

My friends will say that was growth in the economy. Give me a break. Growth in the economy would not even be half of that. It would not even come close to accounting for that massive increase in income taxes. This is an increase of over $20 million. It is a 40% increase. Where did that come from? It came from these sorts of sneaky, back door taxes that this government has used 36 times in order to get more money out of the pockets of Canadians.

It is no wonder we had people standing up at the Liberal convention chiding the government and telling it we need to have lower taxes in this country.

I will simply conclude by saying to my friends across the way and to my colleagues around the House that this is an important issue for municipalities. They are already struggling to provide services that used to be provided by other levels of government. They are struggling to provide basic infrastructure for their constituents. Let us not approve this and further circumscribe the ability of municipalities to provide those services.

Let us go the other way. Let us ensure that the government starts to fulfil some of its promises that it made in previous elections to provide greater transfers to other levels of government which do a far better job of delivering services than a big, fat, bloated central government in Ottawa. Let us hold this government to those promises.

[The Budget, March 18th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, or maybe it is just a case of the finance minister fixing things to suit his own political ends.

The facts are these. The government fudged the books by billions of dollars. It was caught fudging. It admitted it was fudging and now it is trying to change the rules to cover up the fact that it fudged these things.

Why will the finance minister not admit that if had followed these rules all along there would be hundreds of dollars per taxpayer available for general tax relief?

[The Budget, March 18th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, as part of their threatening letter to the auditor general, the finance minister's henchmen admitted what we have been saying all along. The government is guilty of breaking public sector accounting principles and it plays fast and loose with billions of taxpayer dollars. Instead of fixing its shoddy accounting it has decided to rig the rules to weasel out of it.

Can the finance minister explain to Canadians why it is okay to change the rules in the middle of the game just because they were caught cheating at the old rules?

[Division No. 104, March 17th, 1998]

Mr. Chairman, can the minister give the House his assurance that this bill is in the usual form?

[Division No. 103, March 17th, 1998]

Mr. Chairman. could the minister give the House his assurance that this bill is in the usual form?

[Auditor General, March 17th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the facts are very clear here. The finance department feels threatened by the auditor general's criticism and it is doing what it can to shut him down.

The fact is that the finance minister cooked the books. He has played fast and loose with billions of taxpayers' dollars. Instead of threatening the auditor general, my question is why does the finance minister not be a big boy, take his lumps and start accepting criticism from the taxpayers' watchdog?

[Auditor General, March 17th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the facts are these. The government has played fast and loose with billions of taxpayers' dollars. It has cooked the books of the country and violated its own accounting guidelines. The auditor general has rightly criticized this in public.

Now the finance department has tried to shut down the auditor general in a toughly worded letter, calling into question his professional judgment. The letter says that they also wish to register their profound astonishment that this issue has now been reported to the press.

Public scrutiny, what a terrible thing. Why is the finance minister trying to muzzle the auditor general?

[The Budget, March 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, those words are his, cookin' the books.

The auditor general does not trust the government's accounting, neither does the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. They all say that there are problems. From one day to the next the Prime Minister and the finance minister cannot keep their stories straight.

My question is when will the government give Canadians a full and frank accounting of the government's financial position without the game playing that has become the finance minister's trademark?

[The Budget, March 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, when asked last week where he got the money for his new millennium scholarship fund, the Prime Minister told the House: “Yes indeed, we have two and a half billion dollars available at the end of the year”. In other words, what the finance minister was saying before about there not being a surplus was wrong according to the Prime Minister. The real story is finally starting to emerge.

Given the glaring contradiction between what the Prime Minister said and what the finance minister said, how can we trust any of the numbers in this budget?

[Canada Labour Code, March 16th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak against Bill C-19, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code, for a couple of reasons.

First, Bill C-19 erodes a couple of Canada's highest political values, both democracy and freedom. Second, Bill C-19 causes division not only between employers and employees but also because it creates two classes of citizens in Canada.

Specifically the legislation sets the rights of people who ship grain above the rights of those people who, for instance, might ship other commodities like those of their neighbours next door who grow something like alfalfa.

I also point out that the legislation has been roundly criticized by a number of people. It is not just me who holds the legislation in low esteem. For instance, we note in the last parliament that the Liberal dominated committee which examined the legislation found cause to criticize a number of aspects of the legislation. At that time it was known as Bill C-66. In part the legislation died going into the last election. Liberal senators wanted to take some time to look at it and as a result the legislation died.

It has been reintroduced as Bill C-19 and I want to explain to the public and to my colleagues in the House why I strongly oppose this piece of legislation.

The first thing that concerns me is the fact that the new Canada Industrial Relations Board, the replacement for the Canada Labour Board, would be allowed to certify a union on virtually any pretext without a democratic vote. That is completely anti-democratic. It stands opposed to everything that Canadians as democrats truly believe in. I am offended that the government would choose to introduce this now and to allow that to happen.

If my colleagues doubt for a moment the impact of that type of provision, I refer them to what happened recently in both Ontario and British Columbia where provincial legislation allows labour boards to essentially go ahead and certify unions either in opposition to what workers have decided themselves in a free vote or in some cases allowing labour bodies to go around the idea of having a vote at all.

One of the best examples is a Wal-Mart store in Nelson, B.C., where recently the British Columbia Labour Board disallowed a vote because “an employer told an employee he would not benefit from the union”. People at the labour board in B.C. have determined that someone's right to free speech, to persuade employees, is somehow wrong. Therefore they disallowed the idea of a vote. It was absolutely unbelievable.

This type of sweeping power would be granted to the new labour board the government is forming now under this new legislation. It is anti-democratic and as democrats we must stand against it.

The second big reason we need to oppose the legislation is that the jurisprudence of the Canada Labour Relations Board would lead us to expect that the new CIRB would deem the use of replacement workers to be unlawful conduct. This causes me grave concern.

Under the current legislation federally regulated industries can use replacement workers to keep their operations viable. In some cases they have to do that if they want to survive as a business. The new legislation will give the board the power to say that they cannot use replacement workers. This is extraordinarily dangerous. It is a step backward.

To all those people out there who understand that in a very competitive global economy these days we need provisions of all kinds to keep our businesses going, they understand intuitively that this will work against that principle and in fact will endanger the livelihoods of the very people who should be benefiting, the employees, if a business is able to keep going. We stand opposed to that.

I note that my colleagues in the Senate raised it as an issue they were very concerned about, as they did also about the issue of the decertification and certification of unions without a vote. It was absolutely unbelievable. They raised these as issues they were very concerned about. I point out that these are Liberal and Conservative senators by and large.

A third point concerns me very much. I know we do not have a lot of time to speak on these issues. Under this new legislation the Canada Industrial Relations Board can order an employer to release to a union representative a list of the names and addresses of the employees who work off site. There is absolutely no provision for obtaining the employees' consent to do that. That causes me concern.

My friends in the Senate were concerned about that as well. They have raised this issue. We know the Sims task force preceded Bill C-66. It provided the basis for some of that legislation. In addition to raising concerns about things like replacement worker provisions the government was proposing and about the proposal to go ahead and certify a union without a democratic vote, it raised concerns about the issue of people's right to privacy. The senators pointed out that if people did not want to be hassled by a union it should be their right.

The privacy commissioner also said that people should not have to be hassled by a union if they do not want to be hassled by it. There could easily be provision for people who work off site to be informed of what a union is proposing, if they give their consent to the employer to release their names and addresses.

That is private information. We should not be putting into legislation provisions that allow unions to go ahead and contact people at home, at their place of work or wherever, when they do not want that to happen. It is important for people who believe in that fundamental freedom, that right to privacy, that we oppose this piece of legislation. Those are things people have talked about in a lot of detail up until now.

I want to talk about one particular aspect of the legislation which affects my riding. It is the provision that would allow service to grain vessels to continue in a strike or lockout condition but would not allow other types of service for other types of commodities.

This is of particular concern in my riding where five plants produce dehydrated alfalfa. When there has been a shutdown on the west coast, in the past those plants have lost millions of dollars in sales. It is a $100 million a year industry. Farmers who grow alfalfa will not get their product from the port to the ship but grain producers will.

We do not want to take anything away from grain producers. Their gain is wonderful. By allowing that essentially what happens is that the bargaining position of alfalfa producers and shippers is weakened. They can no longer combine with the politically powerful farmers who want their grain shipped to markets across the ocean. They are set aside in the legislation. It creates a two tier system and we think it is absolutely wrong.

I stand with my colleagues in the Reform Party and strongly condemn the government for Bill C-19. We believe it is divisive, anti-democratic and works against the principle of freedom. I encourage colleagues around the House to work with their colleagues in the Senate to oppose the legislation. We think Bill C-19 is wrong.