Dave Chatters

[Ethics, October 28th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am sure that after two weeks of scandal every minister over there has had ample time and ample reason to search their recollection, search their records and search their conscience on this issue.

Has the natural resources minister received any undeclared gifts over $200?

[The Environment, October 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, this incident could significantly delay the construction of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline.

This pipeline is critical in ensuring sufficient gas supplies are available for Canadians at a reasonable price.

How will the government protect the timelines of the regulatory process for the Mackenzie Valley pipeline?

[The Environment, October 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the wife of a senior government bureaucrat in the Canadian Environmental Protection Agency has staked a number of mineral claims along the route of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. She did this years before the route was made public. But her husband, who worked on the file, knew the proposed route.

It seems that there is a clear breach of section 29 of the Territorial Lands Act.

Could the environment minister perhaps tell us if he has investigated this case; and if he has, what has he done about it?

[Taxation, October 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, a spokesman for the former finance minister is proposing in conjunction with the NDP a national commission to review and regulate fuel costs. This proposal certainly hearkens back to the days of the national energy program.

When will the government come clean on its hidden agenda to regulate gasoline prices?

[Taxation, October 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the former finance minister indicated in the past that once the deficit was eliminated, the 1.5¢ per litre deficit reduction tax would be removed. The current Minister of Finance has discounted this possibility.

Given the government's support for today's supply motion, it has become clear that the new Liberal leader is now in control.

When will the 1.5¢ deficit reduction tax be eliminated?

[Supply, October 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, there were a number of questions. Of course most Canadians, when they discover they are paying a tax on a tax, are outraged at that idea. It is fundamentally unfair and most are surprised that it is not criminal, as a matter of fact, or that it is not illegal. But of course it is not. The government knows no bounds when it comes to collecting taxes.

One thing Canadians have learned over many years is that once a tax is imposed upon Canadians, it is rarely, if ever, removed. After all, income tax in this country was only a temporary tax too at one time; it certainly was never removed. I think that on the Liberal side the idea is quite foreign that once the objective of a tax is met the tax should be removed.

I would suggest that the government can be compared to a drug addict or an alcoholic; it is actually addicted to taxes. It does not know how to operate without taxes and in fact cannot operate without collecting more and more taxes. I warn the Liberals, though, that like an alcoholic or a drug addict, one day they will find there will not be any more and they will crash down very hard.

As for their policy on taxes, they have, up to this point at least, consistently suggested that they do not support the concept of dedicated taxes at the same time that the former finance minister was imposing a dedicated tax to pay down the deficit. Again, it is nothing but hypocrisy. They support any kind of tax as long as it serves their purposes, whether it is dedicated or otherwise.

I think the idea of providing some long term and stable funding for municipalities to begin to rebuild their infrastructure is a good one. Liberals should support it and they should make that very clear.

[Supply, October 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to engage in the debate today. It never ceases to amaze me that the government's hypocrisy has no bounds.

I thought I saw it all when two years ago the government voted against same sex marriage and then only a few days ago the government suddenly reversed its position and voted for same sex marriage.

Certainly, that was bad enough. However, the motion today is even worse. It was only in June that the Canadian Alliance introduced a motion in the House with this very same proposal and the government voted against the motion. Today, the government appears to be prepared to make the switch and support the motion.

It is really not hard to tell that there is not only a transition happening in the Liberal leadership, but an election is certainly in the air to encourage the government to do that.

However, the issue of gasoline taxes and where the taxes go is not a new debate in Canada. The Liberal government under former Prime Minister Trudeau many years ago placed a gasoline tax to pay for the creation of Canada's national oil company.

The government likes to play semantics with that tax. The reality is that that tax has never been removed. The purpose of the money may have switched in a different direction, but certainly the tax never disappeared and remains with us to this day. It goes into general revenue of course.

Then the new leader of the Liberal Party, the next Prime Minister, put a 1.5¢ a litre tax on gasoline to eliminate the deficit when he was finance minister. The deficit has been gone for a number of years. Amazingly, the tax remains.

The hypocrisy around the issue from government members, in particular the speech by the member for Erie—Lincoln I heard this morning, is quite amazing.

We are building a huge deficit in this country. Maybe the member for LaSalle—Émard has solved the fiscal deficit of the government. In fact, over the last many years we have been building a huge infrastructure deficit. It is the infrastructure not only of our roads but of our urban infrastructure, and the member referred to it earlier as our core infrastructure. There is a huge and growing deficit that needs to be addressed.

I guess I must applaud the government for coming around to that point of view. Again, I think it is hypocritical because it only does it when there is an election coming up. I am afraid that after the election if the government's position can flip that quickly one way, it can quickly flip the other way.

We must come up with a proposal. We had a proposal and, as a matter of fact, our proposal is Canadian Alliance policy no. 15 in our policy sheet. It proposes:

We will ensure that taxes which are imposed for a specific purpose should be used for that purpose alone, should be removed once no longer required, and not be allowed to be put toward general revenue.

This has been the Canadian Alliance policy for many years. It is a policy that we will implement when the Canadian Alliance becomes the government.

On the other hand, it is very hard to tell what is the government's position on this issue. The current Minister of Finance is quoted in a number of places saying that he does not support the proposal. He stated:

I know that the provinces really like the tax points, but sometimes, they forget about them. They really like them because they want us to impose the taxes and then let them spend the money.

Of course that is the old Liberal mentality: that government does not give money to anything unless it is tied with strings in some way that benefits the government itself. The Liberals find it difficult to dedicate money to anything that does not return a benefit for them. I think they forget sometimes that the money they are spending is not really their money. It belongs to the taxpayers. And there is only one taxpayer in the country.

While this country's huge infrastructure deficit continues to grow, so does the amount of money the federal government collects in gasoline taxes, both in excise tax at the pump and in GST. As my colleague just pointed out, there is GST on top of the excise tax and it is big. I believe the figures show that in this current year revenues from the excise tax and the GST will amount to $7 billion a year. While a minuscule amount of that is returned to some provinces for road infrastructure or infrastructure projects, the amount is very small.

In spite of the fact that there is an equalization program in the country which is designed to let all provinces provide relatively equal services to their citizens, amazingly enough in my province of Alberta the federal government collects half a billion dollars in gasoline taxes and does not return one red cent to that province for road infrastructure. I think the figure is that 98% of what the government does return, the paltry amount that it does return to fund infrastructure, goes to Quebec, Ontario and Atlantic Canada.

There is a real and fundamental unfairness in that formula. I think anyone could come up with a better and fairer scheme than that one.

Of course the government will always rave on about its notorious infrastructure programs that it has been implementing since 1993. While the programs did garner some popularity with municipalities across the country, mainly because the municipalities were desperate for money, those programs were tied to a sharing formula of one-third, one-third and one-third. In many cases, municipalities could not come up with the kind of money they needed to fund one-third of the projects and, therefore, that infrastructure could not be funded through the program.

I think our proposal is a good one. We appreciate that the government is coming around to our way of thinking and is prepared to support the motion, but I urge Canadians to look closely at the record of the government and the incoming prime minister, to look at the record on this issue and so many others. I suggest that the government is not to be trusted just because it chooses to make promises that Canadians across the country like to hear at election time. Its record of fulfilling those promises once it is elected is really quite dismal. I do not expect that on this issue it will be any different than it was on the idea to scrap the GST or any of the other promises the government has made over the years.

Our proposal to take an amount of three cents a litre, which has been suggested, is reasonable. The federal government should vacate that tax room on the condition that the provinces collect the three cents and pass it on to municipalities specifically for infrastructure funding. It would provide a long term and stable source of income for municipalities and would be a much fairer and more equitable system across the country than the political patronage system we have now. I urge all members to support our motion.

[Natural Gas, September 30th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the North American supply and demand of natural gas should be a real concern to consumers because of the potential for price spikes over the winter months. There is enough supply in the ground for the long term but what we need from the government is a commitment to a transparent and consistent approach to regulatory policies and principles, one that encourages investment and allows the industry to bring known reserves to market to meet the growing demand and provide price stability and avoid a short term supply crisis.

The construction of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline is crucial for the supply of natural gas in this country. I encourage the government to do whatever it takes to move this project forward.

The Canadian Gas Association is recommending a national round table for the natural gas industry which would help maximize the potential of this strategic resource. I would encourage the government to assist the industry with the creation of this round table and participate where appropriate.

[Income Tax Act, September 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I enjoyed the member's speech. It was excellent because the member's riding of course is very natural resource dependent, as mine is. I thought it was a very good speech aside from the advertising part of it. It was pretty good up until the last, then he really blew it, in my opinion.

He clearly did not get the message that my colleague from Medicine Hat was pointing out, a message that he should know in his part of the world. That is the fact that if we cannot attract investment and cannot create development, particularly in our part of the world, in the natural resources sector, we do not have the capacity to look after the poor and the hungry, health care, education and all the rest of that. The message that we are sending is that the level of corporate taxation is so important to the ability of a country, or a province or territory to provide services to its members. Therefore, I am disappointed with the last remarks.

Overall, I could not agree more with all the arguments that the member made about the value of the bill and what we are trying to do. However all those issues and arguments were valid in the year 2000. His government and the now leader of the Liberal party, the soon to be prime minister, apparently could not see the value of those arguments back in the 2000 budget when they cut the corporate tax rate from 28% to 21% for everyone but the resource industries. Therefore, I have to ask the member this. Why could the then finance minister not see then what he can see now in the arguments he has presented?

[Income Tax Act, September 24th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, that was an interesting presentation by the member. I am disappointed that he would choose to target Alberta in his remarks because I do not think the adjustment in the corporate tax rate was intended to benefit Alberta's industries any more than all Canadian industries.

As he pointed out, the resource depletion allowance was intended to be a direct compensation for the payment of resource royalties to the provinces. To now drop that 25% resource depletion allowance and replace it with a direct deduction for the actual amount of royalties paid to the provinces seems to me to be the only fair way to deal with the issue.

Certainly there are some distortions in the system with some of the mining companies when we take that into consideration but I would suggest that if we are going to start examining those distortions with a microscope we should also look at how the receiving of equalization payments affects the royalties that provinces chose to charge their resource development companies. I would suggest there is a distortion there as well because certainly for every dollar increase in resource royalties that a province charges a company that develops that resource, it means a reduction in a dollar of equalization.

I would suggest that it has had an effect over the years in the resource royalty income of the provinces from those resource developments.

It is a complex issue but I would urge the member to consider the fairness and instead of an arbitrary allowance for the payment of those resource royalties that the actual deduction is a much fairer system. I would not argue with the member that we still need to look at fiscal instruments in a number of resource sectors that will help make them competitive globally and help them to develop, to be successful, to create jobs and to pay money into the provincial coffers.

However I would express my disappointment that the member would single out some provinces being favoured by Ottawa and some not. I do not think that it is fair nor do I think it is the intention of the legislation. Quite frankly, I think it is a bit petty.