Ian McClelland

[Health, February 3rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Health. I ask this question on behalf of millions of Canadians including Mr. Norman Henderson of Ottawa.

Given the horrendous cost to the health of Canadians, to our over-burdened health care system caused by tobacco addiction, and more deaths earlier than the combined total of traffic accidents, drug abuse, murder, suicide and AIDS, will the minister assure the House and the people of Canada that the

government will do everything in its power to discourage smoking, particularly among the youth of Canada including the maintenance of high prices. There is a proven relationship between cigarette price and cigarette consumption.

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to congratulate the hon. member for an excellent presentation. I am sure many people on this side of the House agreed, as did I, with virtually everything he said. It is probably because he came to the Reform honestly, as did I, except that I attended reform school when I was about 12. That was when I got started in Reform.

I wonder if the member would mind expanding on student loans. This is an extremely important situation facing thousands of graduates who are going into default because they cannot get jobs and therefore cannot pay back their student loans.

I wonder if, from the member's side of the House, he could start to do something and we could carry forward a student loan repayment package, perhaps as promulgated by the Canadian Students Association.

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

What can we do to insure that the people who have children, particularly the fathers, support those children?

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member asked if there were anyone over here who could give him a radical new idea to support the millions of children who are living in poverty. This is a serious question.

[Social Security System, February 2nd, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I too remember the NEED program.

As the hon. member mentioned, there definitely is reason to resurrect some of the programs that worked. But if we are going to resurrect and not reinvent the wheel, we had better go back to the marketplace and discuss with people who actually use the program what happened as a direct result of the use of some of these programs.

One of the problems with that particular program was this. When the government is prepared to pay 70 per cent, what happens is that people get laid off and others get rehired to replace them. That may not be the way the program was designed but that was the effect of the program.

I would suggest further that if this kind of thing is done it should be exactly reversed. The majority of the income an employee would get would have to come from the employer, and if the government was going to top up anything, it would have to be the minority amount and not the majority amount.

[Cigarette Prices, February 1st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, over the past two weeks we have heard a lot in this House about lowering the price of cigarettes to discourage smuggling.

We have not heard one word on behalf of the millions of Canadians who believe that lowering the price of cigarettes is merely caving in to lawbreakers, criminals and the tobacco industry.

May I suggest that we reinstate the export tax on cigarettes thereby taking the profit out of cigarette smuggling, that we come down hard on smugglers and continue to discourage smoking by any means possible.

Has the government considered the negative impact on our nation's health that will result from lower cigarette prices and the increased consumption that will result from lower prices.

[Pre-Budget Consultations, February 1st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I will be very quick and very brief. The essential basis of anything we do as far as taxes are concerned or concessions to anybody, business or people, is that we have to have a foundation of fairness in everything we do.

It must not only be seen to be fair, it has to be fair. That is what this great debate is on when we talk about whether or not people should have deductibility of a business expense, lunches and that sort of thing.

What we have to do is to inculcate a sense of fairness in everything we do and set a direction and leadership from this House so that when people in Canada say: "Well, we have to tighten up our belts and live within our means", they can look to the Parliament of Canada and say: "Look, they are setting the example and that is where the leadership has to come from".

[Pre-Budget Consultations, February 1st, 1994]

Yes, Mr. Speaker, I definitely would. As a matter of fact the faster we can get to a flat tax system the happier I will be. This whole notion of write offs for this, write offs for that, you have to be a Philadelphia lawyer, you have to have 14 tax accountants to figure out where Tuesday was, is absolutely insane.

We will have a revolt but the revolt will be all the tax lawyers and tax accountants who will be looking for work if we only simplified it and made it fair.

[Pre-Budget Consultations, February 1st, 1994]

That is right. It was David Lewis. It has not changed. It is not the role of the federal government or any government to take from individuals and decide who are going to be the economic winners and losers in society. That is the role of private entrepreneurs.

We would go a long way in reducing this tax burden on Canadians if we were to stop this insane practice of government grants and handouts to business. If a business does not have what it takes to run on its own, it should not be in business in the first place. If a business has to have money from the government to be established you can bet it is going to have to have money from the government to continue.

The government's role then in business, at least in my opinion, is to have an infrastructure program that allows for consistent high quality education in the country so that we have a resource pool of people to get into business. Roads, sewers and other infrastructure, consistency from orders of government and environmental standards, that sort of thing. But most of all there should be a tax environment that rewards investment and entrepreneurial risk by allowing those who actually do something to keep some it.

A final and important point is that we should elevate the status of innovators and entrepreneurs in our society to a level commensurate with the commitment in what entrepreneurs, investors and risk takers actually give to our society.

[Pre-Budget Consultations, February 1st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the other day the Prime Minister suggested in Question Period that each member present had a bill of about $3 million for his or her part of the overhead. I hope the Prime Minister pays close attention because I am just about to pay mine off as my contribution to this debate.

This really is the speech I was elected to give. This is why I got into politics in the first place. I hope that over the next couple of years I will be able to make a continuing contribution through the caucus and through the House to our national debate on the economy. I want to thank the government very much for making this possible so early in this 35th Parliament. It is going to be an evolutionary process as we go from this budget to the next budget.

I am one of those real live entrepreneurs that one hears so many people talking about. I went to Edmonton in 1975 with absolutely nothing. I was living in a basement apartment at my sister's. I was paying maintenance to my ex-wife who lived in Vancouver.

I started with absolutely nothing and built a business that 20 years later at its peak does about $7.5 million a year with 130 employees. Today, this very day, I am proud to tell everyone that our employees are one-third share owners in the company. As of

today, the ink is dry and we have gone one-third to our employees, one-third to me and one-third to my partner. I am very proud of that.

Over these 19 or so years that we have been in business I am embarrassed to say that we have been the recipients of one grant from the government. We got $16,000 through western diversification. I am in the photo finishing business. I think somehow the $16,000 grant from the federal government came from the Western Grain Transportation Act. Figure that one out. How did my photo finishing business end up getting about $16,000 from the Western Grain Transportation Act through western diversification?

The real question here is that we qualified for the grant because a person came knocking on our door and asked: "Are you doing any expansion? If you are, I can get money from the federal government for you. You do not have to do a thing. All you have to do is open your books. I will go through them and I get 25 per cent of anything you can get". I thought long and hard about this because we had gotten this far without a nickel from the government and would it not be nice to get everywhere without a nickel. But then I thought that we were paying the taxes and if we did not take advantage of these bonehead programs our competitors would, leaving us at a disadvantage. Therefore we did.

We received that particular grant because we were getting involved in another aspect of the business. Our investment was $300,000. Does anyone in this House reasonably think that any business person would make a business decision of whether or not they should make an investment of $300,000 because they can get $16,000 from the government? Absolutely not. And any business person who would, should probably not be in business in the first place.

Over Christmas I was having coffee with one of our employees in the lunchroom. I said: "Joan, if you have a word to say, here is a chance to say it. What would you like me to say?" She replied: "Tell them to stop having the government take money from me to give it to somebody else. I am barely getting by on $10 an hour. Tell them I am sick and tired of the government and other people wasting my hard-earned money".

When was the magical mystical moment that we as members of this government or elected members of any order of government suddenly went through a magic laying on of hands and became venture capitalists? It did not happen. We as government take a dollar in taxes from business or individuals. We take it into government, we chew it up and spit it out as 20 cents. We give that 20 cents to someone else to go into competition with the very people who gave us the dollar in the first place. It just does not make any sense.

One can see in any newspaper the government grants and government loans, government money for nothing. There are over 600 grants through the various government agencies that people can get. Peat Marwick Thorne has a book on how to get money out of the government. Large businesses have people on staff that do nothing but get money from government.

If we had a Klondike today it would not be out west or in the north. It would be right here in Ottawa where there are people mining for gold whose business it is to get money out of the government. Well that money people get is money which is earned by individual taxpayers, $10 and $20 at a time and we have to think about it in that context.

It must have been over 20 years ago that an hon. member of Parliament coined the phrase of corporate welfare bums. Well it has not changed.