Monte Solberg

[Supply, September 26th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, there is more than one version of a flat tax.

The hon. member for Calgary Centre has presented a version which would include RRSPs and would be a modified version of the present system. It would be far simpler, far less complicated, and people would be able to understand it a lot more. He is just being reasonable. He is saying: "Let's not throw out everything that we have done up until now. Let's remember that the current tax system is what undergirds different parts of the economy".

If we yank it out in one big sweeping movement, there will be all kinds of implications throughout the economy. He has presented a very reasonable way of simplifying the system, still allowing people to save for their own retirement, especially at a time when

the government has failed to do anything to preserve the Canada pension plan, thus imperilling the future of many Canadians.

[Supply, September 26th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, of course we believe in honouring our tax treaties but I simply must respond to some of the things the hon. member said.

She spoke with some conviction about how wonderful it was to be involved in international trade, how it was providing jobs and that kind of thing. I agree. It is a very important aspect of what we do in Canada.

I am just curious to know why the hon. member and her colleagues fought so hard against international agreements like NAFTA and actually broke their promise to renegotiate it. Again I find it fairly strange. I was talking about broken promises. I thank the hon. member for reminding me of a major one that the Liberals broke which was that they were going to renegotiate the NAFTA agreement. Of course they completely and utterly failed to do that. I do not know who they are going to blame that one on. They cannot blame the auditor general for that one. I guess they will have to accept some responsibility for that one themselves.

With respect to the complexity of the taxation system, we are not suggesting that we can reduce thousands and thousands of pages of tax rulings down to a single page. Hardly. We are suggesting that after three years in government the government should have done something to clarify that particular piece of tax legislation. The government employs batteries of lawyers and accountants. By this point in the government's mandate it is important that it look at all its taxation policies and ensure that there are not big loopholes or at least there are not issues that are up for dispute which would allow people potentially to ship $2 billion out of the country without it being taxed.

[Supply, September 26th, 1996]

I have to find the right words-misleading words, which Canadians are simply not going to buy. Canadians are tired of being misled on a whole variety of issues and they are not going to accept it any more.

I have talked for a few minutes about one of the two issues that I have identified as being ones that are important and which flow from this whole debate over family trusts and the finance committee's criticizing the auditor general. I have talked about the attempt by the government to shift responsibility over to, in this case, an independent officer of the House, the auditor general. In other cases the government has tried to shift responsibility to whomever it thinks it can.

The second issue I wanted to raise is the whole issue of the confusing taxation system. The government has been in power for three years. Why has it not clarified this particular fine point of taxation law which is so much in discussion and part of the controversy we are talking about today? The fact of the matter is until this issue was raised nobody did anything about it, despite the fact that the government has been in power for three years.

It is fairly clear that Canadians are concerned about how confusing the taxation system is. As the hon. member for Saint-Hyacinthe-Bagot pointed out a few minutes ago, when it is $50 that the average guys owes the government goes after them hammer and claw. It is no secret that the government has actually cranked up its revenue department to go after anybody at all who looks like they have missed including a penny on their taxation forms. There is no question-and I am sure hon. members will attribute to this-that there are more and more people who are complaining to MPs about how vigorous the taxation department has become in scraping every cent out of its pocketbooks so that it can continue to bring more revenue into the government. That is another issue which I will touch on in a moment.

The taxation system is extremely confusing. The Income Tax Act is 2,000 pages thick. There are currently 10,000 cases before the courts on the issue of taxation law. There are all kinds of people who have very serious concerns about the complexity of the tax system.

One of the promises which our party has made is that we would look at the complexity of the taxation system. People have a basic right to understand how the taxation system works. When the government is taking half of a person's money in taxes, it is a basic right for people to be able to understand why the government is taking the money and what it proposes to do with it.

Since this government came to power we have seen 33 tax increases. I have a feeling that people would be a lot more sympathetic to the taxation system in general if overall taxes were not so high. Right now somewhere in the range of 50 cents on every dollar earned goes to pay taxes. That is scandalous. The Bloc Quebecois was talking about a scandal. That is scandalous.

Perhaps people do not realize that since 1983, since the Tories came to power and then the Liberals after them, we have seen

federal personal taxes increase $4,000 a year per individual taxpayer. That is absolutely ridiculous. Then there are excise taxes, which have increased another $1,100 a year.

The finance minister has talked about how he has not raised personal taxes. That simply is not the case. He has raised personal taxes. He has done all kinds of things to do that. There have been 33 tax increases of various kinds since the government came to power. People have felt it in their pocketbooks.

Somebody suggested to me the other day that what should happen for people to really appreciate how much governments are taxing them is for them to write out a cheque every month to send into Revenue Canada for their taxes, as opposed to having those taxes come directly off their paycheques. Then people would come to appreciate just how heavily they are being taxed. Many people understand that.

The average family of four in Canada makes an income of somewhere around $54,000. Roughly half of that, $27,000, goes to pay taxes of all kinds. If someone had to write a cheque to Revenue Canada every month for taxes, it would be well over $2,000 a month. A mortgage payment of $1,000 is a pretty big payment every month. But stop and consider for a moment that people would have to cut a cheque for over $2,000 a month to pay the taxes in this country. It is absolutely outrageous.

We talk about people who are fearful for their jobs. We talk about people who are afraid to start a business, afraid to risk any money they have saved. And how can they save very much when taxes are this high? We wonder why we have an unemployment problem in this country. To me it is not a very complicated problem. When we are paying that much in taxes, how is it possible to save the kind of money that is needed to start businesses? It is virtually impossible.

I will give another example of how the government is working against the ability of people to save money and start businesses and create jobs. This is a perfect example of how the government has proceeded with its tax increases.

On April 22 there was a change in the tax rules affecting the notional input tax credit. When I try to explain it, it becomes very complicated and people just throw up their hands and their eyes glaze over. The net effect of it is that it removes about a billion dollars from the bottom line of small businesses. According to some estimates it amounts to a billion dollars a year. That means those small businesses have to find that billion dollars somewhere else.

Where do they find it? They either find it by charging higher prices to consumers and therefore that tax increase is passed on, or they let people go or perhaps close down their business. Again

people become unemployed. The government has done this over and over and over again.

When we are talking about the taxation system and the point I was trying to make a few minutes ago, I think people would be a lot more willing to suffer with a complicated taxation system if they knew that the government was not using the fact that the system was so complicated and so mystifying to people to raise taxes in a surreptitious way as it has done time and time again.

Another good example is the move to limit how much a person can contribute to RRSPs. That is not a direct tax on personal incomes but the effect is exactly the same as if the government put a tax on personal incomes. What happens is that people end up having to pay more income taxes because they cannot save the money they have traditionally saved through RRSPs for their retirement. On the other hand the Canada pension plan is really in trouble and the government's response to that is to limit the amount that can be put into RRSPs so that people can provide for themselves in their retirement.

Why not give people the dignity of being able to save for their retirement? But the government continuously works in surreptitious ways against the interests of people who are trying to provide for themselves, trying to create jobs by starting small businesses, people who simply want to have a few dollars put away so that perhaps they can take a vacation when they get older, put their kids through university and have the things that back in the 1960s and early 1970s people just took for granted.

I do not think Canadians are demanding a lot. They do not want some utopia in the future. They want the same kind of country we used to have. They want a country where there are balanced budgets, where governments live within their means, where there are small governments which are not in their faces at every turn and every step they take.

Canadians want some reasonable division of responsibilities between different levels of government. Do we really need to have different levels of government involved in every aspect of our lives? Do we have to have three levels of government looking after the environment? Do we have to have two levels of government involved in mining, tourism and agriculture? People want smaller government. They want a balanced budget. They want a taxation system they can understand. I do not think it is being unreasonable.

Canadians want taxes that are high enough I suppose, in that they are willing to pay taxes to look after some basic social programs. They want health care and some kind of a pension plan. But they do not want taxes going into all these wacky social engineering programs that we have seen in the past. They do not want tax dollars going into job training programs that bear no fruit as we have seen over and over again. They say let people who know how to do it do it.

Canadians do not want to see tax dollars going into regional development programs where we fund all kinds businesses which in turn use those dollars to compete against the people who are the ones who contributed the tax dollars in the first place. That is crazy. We end up putting prosperous businesses out of work or putting them under by subsidizing businesses that have been unprofitable to that point. That is crazy yet the government somehow cannot get the message.

I am grateful the Bloc has raised this issue today. I do think there are two big issues that have come from it and I will just touch on them briefly as I sum up.

The issue of the auditor general reporting on the apparent irregularity in tax law points to a couple of different major issues. One of them is the fact that the government has tried to shift the responsibility away from itself on to the auditor general, someone who has saved us billions of dollars in the past. We only wish that everybody in the government would be so vigilant in finding waste.

The other big issue is our confusing tax system. Our member for Calgary Centre has spent hours and hours speaking to people across Canada about the need to reform our taxation system. We hope that this issue will help bring home the need for government to do that.

I want to conclude by saying a word about the auditor general. It is very important when we have these independent officers of the House that the government think long and hard before criticizing these people. It is no secret that the auditor general and successive auditors general have saved the House billions of dollars over the years.

The one final request I would make is for the government to learn a lesson from the auditor general and to apply the same powers to an ethics commissioner. Then as part of the opposition we would not be talking about all the scandals we have to talk about.

[Supply, September 26th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the opposition motion today. As I see it, there are two major issues that flow from the motion and from this whole issue.

First is the government's attempt to redirect criticism for the handling of the affair by blaming the auditor general. That is the first big issue. The second is how confusing Canada's taxation system is, and the failure of the government to provide crystal clear tax policy that prevents disputes of the type we are talking about today. Those are the two big issues.

I want to say a couple of words about this specific incident. What we have here is a curious set of events that led up to the tax ruling in 1991 and a curious set of events that get us to this point in the debate in 1996.

A tax ruling was made that was not made public which had a curious lack of documentation surrounding it. We know that this ruling allowed $2 billion to leave the country in a circumstance where, ordinarily, it may have been taxed. The final point I make with respect to all this is that the auditor general looked at all this and found that there was no wrongdoing.

While there are many unanswered questions, the government has done a very poor job of making tax policy clear. It is very wrong and irresponsible when its members turn around and criticize the auditor general.

The Bloc Quebecois has gone way beyond the pale in suggesting that there is some kind of great scandal here, that Canadians are going to rise up. That is just a little hyperbole on its part.

However, the opposition motion gives us the chance to talk a little more about these two issues, the government using the auditor general to escape accepting responsibility for the lack of clear tax policy and really how confusing our taxation system is.

What I regard perhaps as the most serious of the two issues is the efforts of the government to blame the auditor general and to try to redirect criticism to him so that it does not have to take the heat for not being clear about tax policy.

This has become a theme, really, for the government. I point to the recent responses to questioning by the Prime Minister with respect to the Somalia inquiry. He is blaming the inquiry, in this case, for some of the problems he is having. He is blaming it for taking too long and for being too tough on witnesses.

I see a theme developing where the government is trying to blame other people. In the case we are talking about, its members are blaming the auditor general, an officer of the House and not accepting responsibility themselves. This will catch up with the government so that its members cannot continue to blame other people, particularly independent agencies, when things go wrong.

There is no shortage of incidents where things have gone wrong for the government and I want to talk about a few of those for a moment if I might.

I hate to continue to raise this, but I feel duty bound to do so because it is one of the things people have been talking about the most over the last little while. It is something that Canadians are very concerned about.

I go back to the whole issue of the broken promise on the GST. We had a situation where the government was blaming the media when it came to its broken GST promise: "Oh no, we didn't promise to scrap the GST. Look at our red book". Of course, they were on national television doing exactly that. Again, they were trying to shift the blame. They did it on the GST on reading.

The Prime Minister wrote the don't tax reading coalition and said he would remove the GST on reading materials. We have had policy conventions since then, in 1992 and in 1994, where the government said that it would remove the GST on reading. Now the government is trying to say: "You must have misunderstood. That is not really what we meant at all". This is despite the fact that it is in Hansard and in all kinds of public documents. Again, the government seems to have a problem accepting any responsibility, just like in this debate over the auditor general and his criticism of taxation policy.

We have a situation where the government promised to provide 150,000 day care spaces but it will not accept responsibility for making that promise. I do not support the government when it comes to providing these day care spaces. We believe that it should take a different tact. However, that is not the issue. The government made a promise in the red book and it is now trying to weasel out of it.

During the recent debate over cuts to the CBC, there is a pledge in the red book which states that the government will provide stable funding for the CBC. The heritage minister has been one of the most vociferous defenders of funding the CBC over the years. On numerous occasions the minister has said that we must protect the CBC. I do not agree with protecting funding for CBC Television, not at all, but that is not the issue. The government is trying to weasel out of its promise. It is trying to get out of accepting responsibility for the promises that it made in the past. Again, that is what it was trying to do with the auditor general.

The auditor general should not be investigating those policy areas, the government is saying, he should not even be looking at all those kinds of things because it makes it look bad. That is too bad. It is the government and it has to start accepting some responsibility.

Another issue where the government is trying to get out of a previous promise and shift responsibility away is on the Canadian Wheat Board. I remember very well during the election campaign when we had the Prime Minister and the current minister of agriculture saying they wanted a plebiscite on the wheat board issue. However, there has been no plebiscite.

We also know that since then they have brought down a panel that was going to review the whole issue of the wheat board, what it should be involved in and should there be options for farmers other than the wheat board. The minister hand picked these people and said he was going to listen to their recommendations. Again he is trying to get out of that responsibility. He and the Prime Minister is now preparing Canadians for the fact that they will not meet their promise. We again have the government trying to slide out of a responsibility, a promise it has made.

It does not end there. I want to talk about the big kahuna of promises, the big promise that the government made during the last election campaign. It was jobs, jobs, jobs. I just want to talk about that in detail for a moment.

The Liberals won the election in part because of a promise to create jobs, jobs, jobs. The issue we are talking about they have again tried to redirect criticism from the public, from opposition parties and from other interested people over the issue of family trusts. They have tried to pin it on the auditor general. However, I fail to see how the auditor general or the Somalia inquiry or any of those other groups are responsible for the complete and utter failure of the government to fulfil its promise to provide jobs for Canadians.

We still have, as we did in 1993, 1.5 million unemployed Canadians in this country. That is a scandal. That is what the Bloc Quebecois should be calling a scandal because that truly is. It is not just the unemployed Canadians, it is the underemployed Canadians: 25 per cent of Canadians underemployed. Half of all Canadians are worried about keeping the jobs they currently have. There is scarcely a person in this country who does not know somebody who is unemployed or very afraid of not being able to get a job when they get of school. There is 15 per cent youth unemployment in this country. There are people with Ph.Ds working at minimum wage in jobs that certainly are well below their qualifications. We need the government to start accepting some responsibility for all these broken promises.

Members across the way will say that on average unemployment is going down. That is like saying, as the member for Calgary Southwest says from time to time, that the guy with his feet in a bucket of ice water and his hair on fire on average feels pretty good.

When we talk about unemployment we cannot look at averages. Unemployment in Newfoundland is up around 20 per cent, 25 per cent, 50 per cent, 70 per cent in some communities. That is an absolute human tragedy of monumental proportions. Improvements in the job picture in Alberta do not help the people in Newfoundland one bit. And so we must insist that the government start to accept some responsibility for all the promises it has made.

People in Atlantic Canada, people in Quebec are desperate to find jobs. The government cannot continue, as it has done in the finance committee report, to push the blame on to somebody else. The government of the land is in charge of the levers of power. It makes the decisions. It rode to power on the promise that it would provide jobs, jobs, jobs.

Canadians have a right to know what the government is doing to fulfil that promise, and if it does not fulfil that promise they expect the government to take responsibility, not to shift the blame to somebody else. It is time the government started accepting responsibility.

When a six-year old child does not accept responsibility it is bad. But when adult men and women, capable people, people who are supposedly the cream of the crop, people who make up the caucus and the cabinet of the country, refuse to accept responsibility for promises that are on paper, which they campaigned on, it is scandalous. It is ridiculous.

This government will pay a price. I personally am going to ensure it does. When people make promises like the government has made and refuse to accept responsibility when they do not fulfil them, then they only contribute to the tremendous cynicism we see across the country today when it comes to people's respect for politicians. Is it any wonder people are so disrespectful of politicians today? Hardly.

The government made another promise which it has tried to slide out of, to weasel out of. The red book it states:

A Liberal government will appoint an independent ethics counsellor to advise both public officials and lobbyists in the day to day application of the code of conduct for public officials. The ethics counsellor will be appointed after consultation with the leaders of all parties in the House of Commons and will report directly to Parliament.

Three years have gone by since this government took power. Do we have an ethics counsellor who reports directly to Parliament? Hardly. We have someone the Prime Minister knows who reports directly to him. The Prime Minister allegedly speaks to the ethics counsellor when a scandal arises. Then the Prime Minister comes back and tells us what was allegedly said. But this person is not an independent officer of the House of Commons, not at all.

We have had situations like when the former heritage minister met clients of his department for a fundraising dinner. We asked that these situations be referred to an independent ethics commissioner. What happened? Nothing, despite the fact that the Prime Minister and the government promised in writing to do that. Another promise in writing, another promise broken. And again the government shifted responsibility and said: "Perhaps we were misunderstood. We really do not mean the words that are on this paper".

I do not buy that and Canadians do not buy it either. It is an absolutely ridiculous package of-

[Goods And Services Tax, September 25th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, even the Liberal premiers are now saying that a billion dollars is not enough to cover up the bad smell from this deal.

Nova Scotia Premier John Savage says: "Ottawa can tax books as they do at the moment. We do not tax books and we will not". That sounds like a deal breaker to me.

Since the premiers are now saying they will walk away from the deal, will the finance minister admit that his deal is starting to unravel because the government does not know how to keep its word?

[Goods And Services Tax, September 25th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, according to the Halifax Chamber of Commerce, if the government's GST harmonization deal goes through in Atlantic Canada, housing prices will go up 5.5 per cent, municipalities will be forced to raise taxes, the sales tax on books, of course, will be doubled and the tax in pricing policy will wipe out profit margins for small businesses and gut jobs.

Will the government finally admit to Canadians that this was nothing but a desperate backroom deal to weasel out of its broken election promise on the GST? Will it save Canadian taxpayers a billion dollars by deep sixing it now before more damage is done to the Atlantic Canadian economy?

[Criminal Code, September 24th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-45. Unfortunately, I am going to have to speak in opposition to this piece of legislation. Once again, as my hon. friend from Red Deer pointed out, the government has fallen well short of the mark. It has fallen well short of where Canadians want it to go.

It is the primary purpose of the justice system to ensure that justice is first applied and, second, that it is applied evenly. I want to talk about that aspect of this piece of legislation.

One of the strange anomalies of the bill is that it will grant those people already in prison, who were convicted of heinous crimes, the right to apply for early release. This is a continuation of the so-called faint hope clause.

People like Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo, Daniel Gingras will have the option under this piece of legislation to continue to come before the public to make their case to be allowed out.

Have we, in this country, not learned that people like Clifford Olson crave that type of attention? What right do we as legislators have to allow these people to come forward and continue to wreak havoc in the lives of the victims?

When I talk about victims in the case of Clifford Olson, I am talking about the parents of the 11 children he murdered. Why do we as legislators have a right to allow him to come forward and say the sorts of things that he says in the media to really continue to perpetuate a crime in the lives of those parents? That is ridiculous.

What is the government thinking about when it allows that to happen? Obviously it has forgotten the purpose of the justice system. The justice system is not to serve the criminal, it is to serve the law-abiding citizens. It is to serve the rights of victims.

I have a friend here, the member for Fraser Valley East, who brought down a piece of private member's legislation that received wide support in the House. It called for a victims bill of rights.

That is the appropriate type of legislation to be bringing in. Why in the world are we bringing in what amounts to a criminals bill of rights? Why are we granting criminals more rights? It is absolutely contrary to everything Canadians are telling us. It is contrary to everything we know in our own hearts, yet the government continues to bring down flawed pieces of legislation like Bill C-45. It is absolutely ridiculous. It is counter-intuitive. I do not understand it at all.

To personalize this a little more, I must tell the story of how Daniel Gingras wreaked havoc in my riding several years ago. People may remember the case where he was out on a pass after having murdered a person. He murdered a fellow because he did not like the look of his face, according to his own testimony.

He murdered someone and was subsequently released on a day pass, because it was his birthday, in Edmonton. He overpowered the guard and eventually made his way to Medicine Hat, my riding. He took the shoe laces from a woman and strangled her with them because, according to his own testimony, she was crying like a cow.

These people are scarcely human. They are hubris as far as I am concerned. I do not understand how we can allow these people any rights at all. Yet the government has brought down a piece of legislation that will allow people like Daniel Gingras and others of his ilk to come before not only the courts, which is bad enough, but before the public and to again have their say. They will stir up many bad memories.

That is contrary to what just people in this country believe. It really makes me wonder what possibly goes on in the Department of Justice when they think up pieces of legislation like this.

People across the way will say we have to be compassionate. Compassionate should mean compassionate to everybody, not just to criminals. When people talk about letting loose one virtue like compassion without a counter-virtue like justice, then they will simply allow some of the worst things possible to go on. That is exactly what is happening with this piece of legislation.

What could have happened? I mentioned a minute ago my friend from Fraser Valley East bringing down victims rights legislation.

That is the sort of thing we should have in this country. A lot of people ask why life does not mean life in this country. Even a life sentence in this country usually only amounts to 25 years where there is eligibility for parole after that.

Many people in this country want to go further. They want life meaning life, but in the wake of the Bernardo trial there were many people, as there are still today, believing we need to have a plebiscite, a referendum on capital punishment.

Why is it that people such as Paul Bernardo, Daniel Gingras and Clifford Olson can murder perfectly innocent people, children in some cases, and be allowed to live out their lives when they know that their victims will never ever see another day? That is so wrong yet people across the way allow it to happen. People across the way, who I know in their own hearts do not believe in this legislation, will stand up and vote for it simply because it is the condition, the price that they pay if they want to stay in that party.

At some point principle should mean more than just sticking around in a party so that you can possibly get re-elected. If you believe in principle you should be willing to jettison all that party stuff and stand up for your constituents. That is what members across the way have to do.

I urge all people who are watching today, and I know there are many people watching out there, to let their local MPs know that Bill C-45 simply is not adequate. In fact, not only is it not adequate, it is actually dangerous. It allows all those people who have committed murder in the past to come back and wreak havoc in the future and I think that is wrong.

This legislation tells me the government has not yet gotten the message from the constituents and even from some of its own MPs. People out there want the problem of crime dealt with in a serious way and they want people to get their just deserts when they commit a crime. In some cases that means a life penalty and in other cases I would suggest it means the death penalty.

During the last election campaign I remember going door to door and probably every member in the House ran into this. If you were out after dark very often it was difficult to get women to come to the door.

I know members across the way will say: "Have you not heard the statistics that crime is going down?" I can tell you that people feel very threatened in their homes. I remember how difficult it was to get people to come to the door, especially women, and there is a good reason for that. Let us not cast aside their concerns and say that they just do not know what they are talking about. Let us start introducing some laws that have an effect not only in dealing with crime but in restoring the confidence of people who are afraid to go out on their own.

Nowadays there are bars on the windows of houses and businesses. But in some cases, like the women's prison in Edmonton, we do not even have bars on the jails any more. They are trying to rectify that now after there were some real problems which actually led to the death of an inmate. Certainly people should not feel they have to be prisoners in their own homes simply because we have a government that refuses to get tough with criminals.

Let us face it. There is not an MP in this House who has not heard over and over again from their constituents that people cannot understand why the government has not been tougher on crime. It is not just this government, it was the Tory government before. The Tories were the ones who brought in that ridiculous Young Offenders Act. That is another issue which we will save for another day. It is not just this government, it is several governments in succession.

I hope members across the way will find it in their hearts to stand up for the innocent victims and citizens out there instead of criminals in the next go round.

[Goods And Services Tax, September 19th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I would advise the Deputy Prime Minister to stay away from those bank machines.

I would like to quote from the Liberal Party policy convention: "A Liberal government would reaffirm the historic principles embodied in tax free status for the printed word and remove the goods and services tax on reading materials". The Liberals have put it in writing for us and we are very appreciative of that.

Since the finance minister likes to talk about his government's commitment to education and literacy, I wonder if he can explain his broken promise, for instance, to medical students at Memorial University who are going to have to pay $400 more for their books because of a promise that the Liberals did not keep. In fact, not only did the government not keep its promise it doubled the GST on books.

[Goods And Services Tax, September 19th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the question is, did the Deputy Prime Minister scrap the GST like she said she would? No. Did the Deputy Prime Minister provide stable funding to the CBC? Rather obviously not. Did the Prime Minister fulfil his promise to scrap the GST on reading? Rather obviously not. In fact, he doubled it.

Given a record that would make Pinocchio blush, why should Canadians believe anything at all this government has to say?

[Goods And Services Tax, September 18th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the question is: What is the Prime Minister's word worth? He promised in writing to the Don't Tax Reading Coalition that he would remove the GST on books.

When the Prime Minister appears before his bank machine, how does he rationalize this latest Liberal cop out?