Ian McClelland

[Canada Health And Social Transfer, November 6th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Human Resources Development.

The minister would know that as an unintended result of the block transfers for the Canada health and social transfer many of the Canadians who are most vulnerable or who feel most vulnerable are Canadians with disabilities.

To date Canadians with disabilities have not yet been assured that there will be consultation with the provinces to ensure that persons with disabilities will not be financially affected by the Canada Health and Social Transfer Act. Would the minister make those assurances today?

[Agreement On Internal Trade Implementation Act, November 2nd, 1995]

My colleague says that the Liberals are born again. They are learning. Here they are in government embracing the free trade agreement for the good of all. We are glad to see they have learned the error of their ways.

How is it that we entered into a free trade agreement with the United States, the most aggressive, strongest trading nation in the world, and had not first broken down the internal trade barriers in Canada? It is like getting into a fight with the biggest person in the school yard and saying: "I am going to fight fair. I am going to tie one hand behind my back just to make it fair for you because you are so big. Oh, by the way, just in case you think I might whip you, even though I have one hand tied behind my back, we will have the highest interest rates we have ever had, a high dollar, and we will fight with you in a free trade environment".

It was kind of like a Monty Python skit with the knight that had a head and a torso but no arms or legs. He had the knife in his teeth and was saying: "Fight fair, fight fair. I can beat you". That is what we did. We prostrated ourselves by having high interest rates and by having a high dollar, but most of all we had not broken down trade barriers within Canada so that we would be more efficient before getting into the free trade arena, the global trade arena in the world we find ourselves in. It is absolutely essential the trade barriers be broken down.

This speaks to the nub of the reason we are not supporting the legislation. People would ask: "How on earth can the member speak so positively about the necessity, the absolute need to break down trade barriers, and yet they will vote against the bill?" The reason is that the government has the responsibility to provide leadership and to make sure we actually break down trade barriers.

We get together with the provinces and have months and months of gumming this thing. Nothing happens. The disparity between the provinces in the way they approach the issue is enormous. The fault honestly should not be laid totally at the feet of the government because the provincial governments are involved as well. When the Alberta government came to the table to negotiate the free trade agreement it had one page with one line on it, that there should be no barriers to free trade in Canada. Our neighbouring provinces, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, came to the same meeting with a large stack to protect this, that and the other thing. Ontario, as I am told, made significant concessions. Quebec had to protect everything including the dairy industry and everything else it had.

This is where leadership comes into play, but the federal Liberal government did not lead. Its mandate is to keep people at the table to ensure laws are made to best accommodate the necessities of our country in the future.

In conclusion I will point out what leadership is all about. The Liberals will look at this era in history and hope that the writers and history will look kindly at them. They will look kindly at them if they seize the opportunity to make history, not to be carried along by events and overtaken by them.

[Agreement On Internal Trade Implementation Act, November 2nd, 1995]

Madam Speaker, here it is at least a year after the legislation was introduced. It wends its way through the labyrinth of our political process and finally finds itself back on the floor of the House of Commons.

I thought I would be speaking to the bill yesterday so I thumbed through November 1 in history. Of course today is November 2. Interestingly Michelangelo completed his work on the Sistine Chapel, but it only took him four and a half years. The legislation is progressing apace, but no one will compare it with Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel.

Actually to many observers it looks like a make work project. Anyone who has given the matter even a modicum of thought understands and appreciates how ludicrous it is in our country, united from sea to sea to sea, that it is more difficult to trade internally than it is to trade with any other trading partner we may have in the United States or elsewhere in the world.

When the legislation was being put together and the debate among provincial trade delegations was taking place, more people were sitting around the table trying to break down the barriers of interprovincial trade in our country than there were sitting around the table when we were trying to break down the trade barriers with the United States and to shape the North American Free Trade Agreement.

We had a situation where we were hopefully to have a North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico and there were less people sitting at the table than when we were trying to break down internal trade barriers within Canada.

How did we end up in that situation? How is that our country ends up in a situation like that? Just a moment ago my hon. colleague from the Bloc spoke. I have had the pleasure of spending many hours in committee with the member listening to him defend the unilateral interests of Quebec. I have never once, in the two years that we have been here, heard him mutter one word about the rights, the interests or the values of Canada as a nation. Every word that has come out of the hon. member's mouth and the mouths of all members of the Bloc has been directly related to Quebec, how they can better the interests of Quebec.

The precise reason we have a problem in interprovincial trade in our country is that we have a kind of parochialism about our institutions. It is one of the primary reasons there is so much discontent from coast to coast to coast. For years citizens of Canada resident in the regions of Canada on the east coast, the west coast, the prairies and the north were merely markets for the manufacturing centres of central Canada in Montreal and southern Ontario.

We now have an opportunity to break down trade barriers within Canada, which would greatly strengthen the economic prospects of all regions of the country, including the manufacturing heartland of Ontario and Quebec. And what happens? We get around a table to debate the opportunity to make our country better.

Canadians spent $1.5 million or so to have Professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School do a study on Canada's competitive situation in the world. Interested viewers may know the same study or a study very similar to it could have been obtained for $2,000 U.S. from the Harvard Business School video series. It is exactly the same; it is on competitive strategies.

In any event this $1.5 million study has a recommendation at page 98: "Extend efforts to increase rivalry". It is a well known fact that to get a better product at a lower price we need competitive situations; we need rivalry. Professor Porter in his study asked how we were to be competitive internationally if we were not first competitive at home. How are we to be competitive at home if we have trade barriers that restrict competitiveness? It just makes sense.

This reminds me of the situation we found ourselves in when we entered into the free trade agreement with the United States which

members opposite, I would remind them, fought so vigorously. By and large members on this side and I were very much in favour of it.

[Customs Act, October 31st, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the Reform Party also supports the bill. I will be speaking generally in favour of the bill.

Before I do I will take a couple of seconds and speak to the referendum last night. We cannot pretend that did not happen. We cannot just walk into this place and sleepwalk toward a further disaster.

The hon. parliamentary secretary had a few words to preface his remarks and my blood ran cold when I listened. The essence of what he said was that he welcomed those people who were trying to break up our country over the last couple of years and last night. He welcomed them back and said let us go on as before, working in committee and working in the House.

For the last two years going on before meant that every single word that came out of the mouth of the Bloc, and everyone in the Chamber knows it, has been to one direction, toward building a preface for the referendum last night for taking Quebec out of Confederation.

We cannot go on as before. We have to turn the page on that. We have to go forward. We have had 30 years, all of my adult life, of trying to appease people who would break up the country. It is time to stop it. All it does is foster a festering tribalism evidenced last night for everyone to see on national television by the premier of Quebec.

If we pretend this kind of thing is not going on in our country we are not doing our jobs as representatives of the people who sent us here. Tribalism is tribalism and that is what we have had here for the last two years. Let us not call it anything else.

To the embarrassment of Canadians everywhere, because the vast majority of Liberals opposite are afraid to confront the Bloc, to confront this tribalism, to confront these people, at every opportunity they get they back away. They back away from it in committee. They back away from it in all opportunities in the House. We recognize the Bloc has 53 seats. It is the loyal opposition but that does not need to be the way the House operates.

No one has ever retreated to victory. One does not build a country on appeasement. One builds a country on the values we share. We should be defining the values that make up Canadianism to be a Canadian. It does not matter what language one speaks, what race one is, these are the values that unite us as a country.

I will get on to Bill C-102. The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance explained in good detail exactly what the bill is all about.

We support it for essentially the reasons he said. It is a step in the right direction. It is a step to breaking down trade barriers. My hon. colleague from the Bloc is quite right when he asks why we would set up trade barriers between the rest of Canada and Quebec when we are trying to knock trade barriers down between us and the United States.

We are in the process of breaking down trade barriers. One of the ways to do that in a free trade agreement is to, as GATT has forced us to do, start looking at the zillions of financial transactions that take place with us and the Americans on a daily basis and ask how we can make them easier. That is what the bill does.

Many Canadians travel very often to the United States, as I have on occasion with my family, with our pooch Rex in the back seat. Coming across the border, as we are wont to do, we add up all of our purchases. Especially after becoming a member of Parliament I start sweating about an hour before I get to the border making sure I have everything because the last thing I want to do is find myself in Frank magazine for having smuggled something across the border.

I start to sweat about an hour before we hit the border and I have a list. By the time we get a little closer my wife is upset. She says: "For goodness sake, why do you not forget it? Let's just go". We have everything listed and we are prepared to stop and pay the 5 cents or 50 cents or $5 duty or whatever it is.

The last time we got to the border and we had these itemized lists the customs agent asked how long we had been gone. I said six days. We had our list ready and he said he had good news for us: "Keep on going, there is no duty applicable on this".

That makes great sense. We are absolutely thrilled the government is doing this. The government is also going one step further. It is trusting Canadians to make declarations on what they have.

It is very prudent of the government to carry a big stick. If we as Canadians break our trust and smuggle things through, we do not pay the duty or we do not pay the sales tax applicable, the government should reserve the right to come down hard on us.

The changes in the bill, forced by GATT, by the free trade agreement, are obviously steps in the right direction which we support wholeheartedly.

However, it would seem to me that if somehow we could inculcate within the whole apparatus of government the notion of common sense, we could make life a lot simpler for a whole lot of Canadians doing business.

I want to recount the story of Western Carpet Distributors Inc. in my constituency. A few years ago it was one of the primary distributors of carpet in western Canada. The carpet manufacturers had distributors who would in turn sell their carpets for them. Recently the carpet industry in Canada became vertically integrated. That means that the manufacturers started to sell directly to the retailers without the middleman, without the distributor. When one started doing it they all started doing it.

This left my constituent, Western Carpet Distributors, in a kind of bind. He had built his business over the years and it was a prosperous, successful business. All of a sudden he found that his suppliers were selling direct and no longer selling to him. The carpet manufacturers bought up many suppliers, but for whatever reason they did not buy his business. He was left in a situation where he was competing with the very companies he had built in the first place by supplying product to retailers.

When faced with this, as a businessman is wont to do, he found other suppliers. The other suppliers he found were in the United States. He then had to import material from the United States and sell in competition to the vertically integrated suppliers manufacturing and selling their own carpet in Canada. Because these manufacturers sold in Canada, he had a significant tariff put on his product.

Now it starts to get fairly complicated. The cost of his product should include the retailing or the selling expense. He was not allowed to claim that and had to pay duty on it, yet his competitors did not. This was a fairly substantial blow to him. There is a thick file at Revenue Canada, as he has been trying to get this changed but to absolutely no avail.

We have another situation in which he is caught up, adjusting to that, paying the premium. He is now in a situation where a company that manufactures in the United States, sells to its Canadian subsidiary, a wholly owned subsidiary who then retails, is able to get a cash discount before delivery of 5 per cent. This is within its own family. The manufacturer sells to its wholly owned Canadian distributor but can take a 5 per cent discount. The same Canadian distributor I am talking about does a deal with his competitor and he is not allowed to take that. That is considered a reduction in price, and he has to pay duty on it.

We are treating two apples like apples and oranges. This should not be. If we are prepared to give individual citizens the freedom and the right to be held personally liable and give them the trust to come back and forth across the border, should we not also do exactly the same thing with Canadian businesses? Should we not give Canadian businesses the same trust and responsibility? If they misuse that responsibility, we should come down hard on them like a ton of bricks. But if in the normal course of business they are doing what is not only reasonable but right and makes common sense, why do we not extend that to this sector as well?

Perhaps it is because there would be an army-I do not know; I am sure no one has even thought of it. But if we were to take this to its natural conclusion, there are a lot of things in our Canadian life that we could do as citizens and do not need governments to do for us. We do not need a whole building full of people with sharp little pencils trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong, who is doing what and who is not doing what. If we are going to have free trade, let us have free trade.

In conclusion, I want to put a few remarks forward on this bill just to ensure that they are on the record.

Bill C-102 and bills like Bill C-102 restore faith in the business sector in imports and exports. They help to bring our country to a competitive level. This is good. However, because of our complicated tax system Canadian investors are still investing outside of Canada more than they are in Canada.

We would support this bill. We would ask that the government continue to bring forward bills such as this and try to make life simpler for Canadians as individuals and businesses so that we can face the future in a much more competitive spirit.

[Quebec Referendum, October 30th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, today the people of Quebec are making a decision that will affect not only Canadians living in Quebec but all Canadians. Our country will be profoundly changed regardless of the outcome of the Quebec referendum.

There are two ways to confront change: first, to resist at every opportunity, drawing comfort from that which is familiar; and, second and more difficult but potentially much more rewarding, to accept the inevitability of change, to embrace change and thereby have the opportunity to manage it.

Our country is poised at the precipice of such change. We have an opportunity to put aside past partisanship, past bias, and to look to the future with an open mind.

We have an historic opportunity to fashion a new federation that is flexible enough to accommodate our different visions, strong enough to weather life's storms, and gentle enough to be a beacon of hope to the world.

[Small Business Loans Act, October 25th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly not a threat. It is a statement of the reality of the situation that faces all of Canada, but will face the people of Quebec to a greater degree for a longer period of time than it will everybody else. It is not a threat. It is a statement of the obvious. It is a statement of fact.

In the democratic process people are elected and there is a fiduciary trust responsibility we are prepared to accept the moment we stand for election. That is in everything we do, we will do it not for the betterment or enrichment of ourselves or for self-aggrandizement but we will work for the people who have entrusted their lives to us as their members of Parliament, their elected representatives.

When a person is elected to high office, which is a member of Parliament, there is a trust responsibility to do the very best one can in the interests of the people being served. It then follows that it should be to protect their economic, cultural and ideological interests. It should not be to take them down a treacherous path when they are standing above a precipice. That is not the fiduciary trust responsibility of a person elected to high public office in Quebec or anywhere else in Canada.

[Small Business Loans Act, October 25th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite raises a valid point. As a matter of fact even as we speak the tariff on milk is 350 per cent.

It just absolutely boggles the mind how members of the yes group are able to go through Quebec like Johnny Appleseed spreading these little bits of misinformation all over the place. This

debate is on a level that has no intellectual veracity or honesty in it whatsoever. The debate is purely cosmetic. People who scratch below the surface of the debate will understand very quickly just how devastating the result of a yes vote will be to the people of Quebec. It will hurt everybody in Canada, but it will hurt the people in Quebec far more.

The tragedy is that nothing the Quebec nationalists want to achieve can be achieved outside of Canada that cannot be achieved within Canada. In my view, the very protection of the language and culture they profess to be so concerned about is better protected within Canada. Anyone can bet that on a wide open North American market the French of Quebec will very soon be like the French of Louisiana. They just will not have the bulwark of Canada to protect them.

Lest anyone in Quebec who is watching this thinks that my words are hollow and empty, they should be aware of trade by Quebec with the rest of the country. The hon. member's question has given me the opportunity to put this on record. Lest anyone thinks that a free ride will be achieved by the people of Quebec in terms of their economic future, they should keep in mind that in 1989, the last year for which accurate figures are available, interprovincial trade in Quebec had a balance per year of $1.8 billion dollars in favour of Quebec. If they think that would happen after a yes victory, they can think again. The bulk of that was in protected industries.

That brings us to the free trade agreement, internal trade barriers and how ludicrous it was for us to get involved and the hypocrisy of government members opposite supporting the free trade agreement now when they did not in opposition. I supported it wholeheartedly as a private business person. I certainly did not support the method by which the Conservative government took us down the road to free trade. This is apropos in my view to what is likely going to happen to the people of Quebec if they were to be irrational and vote yes.

We went into the free trade agreement and got clobbered as a country. We did so because we went into the agreement with the highest interest rates we had historically, the highest dollar we had historically and industries across the country which had been protected by tariff barriers for many years. Our industries were not competitive with those in the United States. Is it any wonder we got clobbered. Imagine the Monty Python movie "In Search of the Holy Grail". We were the knight at the bridge and when we finished we had the knife in our teeth and no arms or legs. All we could say was: "Fight fair".

I saw our chief negotiator, Simon Reisman, on the Sparks Street Mall the other day. I wanted to ask him: "Did you not think about this?" I have really wondered about this. Surely the government of the day must have been aware of the situation we were getting ourselves into. Maybe it was not, but it certainly should have been.

If that happened to us as a country, what is going to happen to Quebec as a country in a free trade arrangement with Canada and

the United States? Will Quebec have a high dollar? Probably not. Will it have high interest rates? Very likely. Will Quebec have industries that are capable of competing efficiently in the North American market? Probably not. Are they going to have an easy ride of it? Probably not.

It would seem to me to be very prudent for those people in Quebec who are wondering whether or not they should vote yes or no, if they choose to vote yes, the one thing they can be absolutely assured of is they will be paying a financial premium for many years for voting yes. They will have many years to think about it because it is not something that will cure itself overnight.

[Small Business Loans Act, October 25th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity to say a few words in the debate pertaining to small business.

It is not all that often we get a chance to talk about small business in the House, and we really should. With the indulgence of the Chair and with the indulgence of colleagues present I hope to stray a little from the direct confines of the bill. I know it is most unusual in the House to stray away from the subject matter at hand. I hope to talk about small business in general, to talk about how important small business and entrepreneurship are to our country, and to provide a few words of encouragement for small businesses out there that are struggling today.

Can we imagine what it must be like for an entrepreneur in Quebec even as we speak? We have a situation of systemically high unemployment in Quebec. It has been that way for years, ever since the last separation crisis in 1980 when the people of Quebec chose to elect a separatist government. All that did was give U-Haul one-way traffic to Toronto a bonanza. Ever since the election of the first Parti Quebecois, the first separatist government in Quebec, what has happened? Toronto has prospered largely at the expense of the self-inflicted wounds of the people of Quebec.

All the country has profited because the separatist government in Quebec insists on shooting itself in the foot with separation every 15 years or so. I am sure that is what is ongoing in the province of Quebec.

If the people of Quebec want to do something really worthwhile for their futures, they will resoundingly reject the separatist option. They will resoundingly reject any notion of getting out of the country and will work together to make the country stronger. If they do that it will get entrepreneurs investing in in small businesses in Quebec.

It is about the willingness of people. It is not banks or governments that get businesses going. It is individual people who are prepared to put up everything they have in the world, including their homes and borrowing money from their friends and their families, because they have a dream or an idea to see through to fruition. We should be celebrating the fact that we have these people. These are the people we should be asking in Quebec, because there is systemically high unemployment, how we can go about reversing it.

Let us provide stability. Let us make sure that when people start businesses, particularly in Quebec, they do not have to go through never ending navel gazing, gnashing and worrying about tribalism and nationalism in Quebec. Why would anybody put up with that if they could invest their money in a jurisdiction that does not have such problems?

We have these wonderful people who has invested of themselves. They have put their hopes, dreams and aspirations on the line. What happens when they go into a bank? I can speak from personal experience because I have gone through it, as have other members of the House, many people watching on television today and perhaps a few others who might read the debate.

It is not like going into K-Mart or some other store where they shake hands and say: "We are glad to see you. What can we do for you?" The first thing they say is: "Are you going to do that? We already have a few of these. Didn't you know that somebody just went broke doing this a while ago? If you are to do this, if you are to set up this service, if you are do that, you had better make sure that you can guarantee the borrowing of $1,000 with $2,000".

Instead of the entrepreneur being encouraged, the first remark that comes through is: "We have to protect our depositors' money. Therefore we have to make sure that we do not take any risk at all because you want to borrow $75,000 or $100,000". That is what got the Government of Canada into small business loans in the first place. We ended up as a nation guaranteeing loans that rightly should have been the purview of the banks.

The banks have a licence to print money in Canada. When is the last time we have seen a small, humble bank building? In every city in Canada the four pillars on the four corners of shiny office buildings are bank buildings. That is the way it is. Meanwhile the people of Canada through the tax base are subsidizing the banks. That is what this is all about.

When they went into banks to get loans, the loan officers said that they could not have them because they did not have enough money. The banks had their houses, first born, bicycles and cars. The banks had everything they had in the world but they still did not have enough money for them to feel safe and secure about lending money. If they can lend money to another country and write it off that is okay, but they did not have anything for the small business person, the entrepreneur, the dreamer.

What happens then? The government has to step in and through the Small Business Loans Act guarantee the bank about 95 per cent of the loan at a rate of about 1.5 per cent above prime. Generally speaking any other business paid prime plus two, so there was an obvious magnetic pull to write all small business loan transactions that could possibly be written by the banks and have them guaranteed by the people of Canada, which did not make any sense at all.

The previous legislation raised it so at least the interest rate charged was on par or a little more than the interest rate charged to people who did not have a government guarantee. The amount that would be guaranteed by the government was to be reduced somewhat as well.

As earlier speakers have said, the problem with financing small businesses is not how much people have to pay for the money, within reason. The problem is how to go about getting money in the first place. No matter how good the business plan, if the business person does not have a track record, does not have money and cannot guarantee at least 200 per cent, the chances of getting the loan are somewhat remote. This is why the Government of Canada and the people of Canada, through the Small Business Loans Act, are in the business of protecting the banks. The banks will not do it unless we hold them harmless through the Small Business Loans Act.

In a perfect world we should not be in this business at all. That is what banks should be doing. However we are not in a perfect world. We need to ensure we nurture and help small business people or entrepreneurs. That is why the legislation is so worth while and necessary.

However our job as members of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is to oppose bills not just because we want to oppose them but because we in opposition in Parliament can cause the government to rethink some aspects of its bills and make them better. If all we did every time the government brought forward a bill was to say it was great, roll over and not pay any attention, we would not be fulfilling our function as opposition in the Parliament of Canada.

While it is basically a very good bill it has a flaw I would like to point out to members opposite. I hope the government sees the error of its ways and changes it. The amount of money involved in a guarantee could be changed by order in council. It would not have to come back to the House to be debated. That sets a fairly bad precedent. We are talking about the financial responsibility of the Government of Canada and a change to the financial responsibility of the Government of Canada. These decisions should not be decided in a backroom somewhere, even if the backroom has a cabinet table. They absolutely must see the light of day. They must have sunshine, that being the best disinfectant of all. These decisions should come back to the House. In a majority situation it is not likely they will be changed anyway. The government will have its day no matter what the opposition might have to say about it. The bill would be improved somewhat if the provision in it, which allows the government by order in council to change the ratios, was amended so that it had to come back to the House.

I should like to spend a few minutes talking about small business people and where we are going a bit off the rails. The people of Canada who are prepared to give of themselves as entrepreneurs to create wealth and employment across the country are very often at great risk to themselves and to the capital they have built up. They should in some way be honoured. It seems passing strange that the people most revered and honoured in society are hockey players, for instance, who might earn a couple of million dollars a year playing hockey but have never created a job or actually put their lives on the line.

Some accounting firms and chambers of commerce are beginning to recognize that as a nation we need to applaud and encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. To be an entrepreneur or an innovator who creates wealth is a necessary and fundamentally important function any citizen can provide.

I recall attending a meeting sponsored by the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce. The person who appeared at the meeting came from a small town in Colorado. He had won a prestigious international award. His company had gone from nothing to worldwide sales of approximately $500 million a year. His company manufactured tapes used on computers to back up the memory.

They cannot make mistakes with these tapes; they have to be highly precise.

The town in Colorado had an IBM manufacturing facility. IBM wanted to move it to Florida or some such place. Many key people in the business did not want to leave their town because of the life they could lead there; they loved living there. Rather than moving they left the company. They thought to themselves that they were smart, innovative people and wondered what they could do. They decided they would make the world's best recording device, magnetic tapes for computers. They did it by innovation.

He drew to our attention that the town had since become the hub of innovation and entrepreneurship. The people in that town have a week in which to celebrate the leadership derived from small business people. The innovators and entrepreneurs are part of the social fabric of the town. They have star status because the people understand the value of entrepreneurship and innovation.

All across the land thousands of men and women, young and old, have put everything they own on the line with the bank to support their small businesses. They are truly the stars of our economic system. They are the people we should be celebrating, not the big business people who have grants, handouts and loans from the government. It just makes one sick. The bigger the business is, the bigger the hand is into the banking system and into the government system. This is what we must put a stop to. It is wrong to have our priorities so misplaced that we do not recognize what small business people and entrepreneurs contribute to our society when all we can look at are the big mega stars.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you and my colleagues for the opportunity to make the case for small business in our country. I applaud anything we can do to build and strengthen that sector of our economy.

[Quebec Referendum, October 25th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday in a speech to thousands of supporters of the no side, the Prime Minister told Quebecers that he is not opposed to future change in Canada if they vote no.

The Reform Party has long called for renewed federalism without constitutional change. To this end it has put forward a 20-point plan to modernize and decentralize Canada.

By adopting the Reform Party policy paper on a new confederation, all of the provinces of Canada would benefit from a decentralization of powers. Furthermore, the 20-point plan would allow for reform of our institutions and could be made, bringing greater representation to the people and the regions of Canada.

Most important, by adopting the plan, the changes could be made without comprehensive federal-provincial negotiations, such as the Meech Lake or the Charlottetown accords.

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of all Canadians, I want to point out that voting No does not mean voting for the status quo.

[Canada-United States Tax Convention Act, 1984, October 18th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the member opposite to expand on one aspect that is very important and of which Canadians should be much more aware. By and large Canada is a branch plant operation of the United States. The vast majority of the industries in Canada are branch plant operations of the United States. The real profit is derived by American corporations in transfer pricing where the American parent charges the American marketing arm a price and the Canadian marketing arm a substantially higher price. Therefore, there are very few profits relative to the amount of business activity generated in Canada, thus very limited corporate profit taxes paid in Canada.

Given the fact we know this to be the case, why are there just 12 auditors involved in this, as evidenced by his speaking notes? The member opposite thinks we should be doing something. We are stuck with this legislation as it is a treaty that we have already signed. It is going through. Should we not put more emphasis into that part of the audit?