Lee Morrison

[Standing Committee On Transport, March 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, everyone knows that under our system standing committees have no power and only limited influence. Some of them, especially the Standing Committee on Transport, are becoming totally irrelevant.

The transport committee has not done anything significant since completing it passenger rail study in June. On December 1 it rubber stamped amendments to the Railway Safety Act. Since then it has met five times and done absolutely nothing.

Twice the committee has winnowed through a long wish list to come up with study topics acceptable to a majority of members. Twice that same majority has voted to reverse the previous decisions.

The first change in direction was due to blatant ministerial interference. Opposition members suspect that committee inactivity reflects the minister's wish that nothing controversial ever be addressed. The committee has not met, not even in camera, since March 2.

[Trade, March 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Canadian Heritage.

The Canadian live cattle export industry, which is worth about two and a half billion dollars a year, is already being targeted by the Americans. Senator Baucus and his cohorts in the American agricultural lobby are rubbing their hands in glee at the possibility that they will be able to justify or rationalize a countervail based on Bill C-55.

Why is the minister so eager to sacrifice western Canadian farmers to the greater glory of Ted Rogers?

[Bill C-68, March 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, this Thursday I met with five angry police officers. They are angry because federal funding cuts are imperilling essential police services while hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to implement Bill C-68. They are angry because the money already wasted on a registry of personal firearms would have been more than enough to upgrade the vital CPIC system.

They are angry because the closure of the RCMP training depot in Regina, even if it is only a temporary measure, guarantees that the force will continue to be short-staffed for years to come.

They are angry because underfunding of forensic services means that laboratory results which used to be available in a matter of days now take several weeks.

They are angry because in addition to diverting vast sums that could be used to fight crime, the firearms registry is generating public ill-will which hinders the ability of officers to do their jobs.

[Income Tax Act, March 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, on November 6, 1998, I raised a question in the House regarding the loss of tax revenue by western rural municipalities when land is converted to Indian reserves.

In responding, the government House leader clearly did not have the faintest idea of what I was talking about. He stumbled and stammered that his government fully understood its obligations to aboriginal Canadians and as always he adhered to the standard Liberal policy of when you do not understand the issue, obfuscate. In order that the government can compose a rational response, I will now pose my question in great detail.

There are two types of native land claims being settled by federal and provincial funding of land purchases by Indian bands. Treaty land entitlement claims involve lands promised by the government as part of the original treaties with the Indian bands. Some bands were shortchanged mainly due to incorrect counts of band members. A recent recalculation has resulted in the awarding of huge additional entitlements based, not on the original 19th century populations, but on recent counts.

Using remarkable Liberal mathematics, I suppose that the treaties should rationally be reopened in 10, 20 or 30 years hence until ultimately all of the west has been returned to its original owners. However I am digressing. That is a subject for another debate. Tonight the subject is taxation.

Land purchased under treaty land entitlements and transferred to reserve status is land removed from the tax base of rural municipalities. However, for the loss of these particular lands, the rural municipalities are very fairly given a grant of 22.5 times the annual tax revenue as compensation.

Unfortunately there is a second type of entitlement which has a totally different outcome to the rural municipalities. Specific land claims are to return lands lost through unlawful acts or land arbitrarily taken away from a reserve without compensation. For such claims, rural municipalities will only be compensated at five times the previous year's taxes. This is blatantly unfair and it represents a disavowal of federal commitments made to the rural municipalities in 1991 and 1993. It is a breach of trust. The only rationale for the reduced rate seems to be that it is cheaper for the senior government to download its responsibilities onto the municipalities.

However, it is certainly not cheaper for rural taxpayers who will pay more to cover the shortfall. They are hit twice, once as Canadian taxpayers to purchase the lands and once as municipal taxpayers to provide the services in perpetuity, the roads primarily, for these alienated pieces of land. That is not fair.

It is very easy for a government to be generous at the expense of someone else. If a debt is owed to natives for land unfairly taken from them, it is a debt owed by all Canadians and not just by a handful of Saskatchewan farmers. Why does this government find that so hard to understand?

[Income Tax Act, March 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I applaud the general premise of the member for Dauphin—Swan River that politicians should not be treated more favourably by the income tax system than charities.

However, I have a severe problem with what is happening in the, I would hasten to say, charitable industry in this country. It is a little disconcerting that there are over 70,000 registered charities, all entitled to the standard deduction which is afforded to people who are able to get their hands on a number. I wonder how useful a lot of these organizations are, how much of their intake is actually swallowed up in administration and salaries and so on.

Seventy thousand charities. There has to be something wrong there. They are not all Salvation Army or the Canadian Cancer Society. These are people who have their own little private axes to grind. They are getting a tax break which in many cases I do not think could be justified if we could do a serious audit on them.

All of us who read the daily papers know what is happening. Audits are being done on a very selective basis. People that are not necessarily in accord with the government of the day are having their numbers revoked, whereas other charities that are perhaps more friendly to the philosophy of the Liberal Party are not having their numbers revoked, even though they are engaged in proselytizing, evangelism or whatever one wants to call it.

On that basis we may have allowed this thing to get a little out of control. I do have some very grave misgivings about the member's bill.

[Income Tax Act, March 9th, 1999]

That is officially noted, precisely.

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, March 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I would like to hear the comments of the hon. member for Palliser on a couple of things that I picked up on in his speech.

One is the question of the formula. He mentioned several times things that he found good or bad in the formula. I would like to get his party's take on something that has certainly been running through my mind for a long time. That is, it would be very expeditious to simply base the equalization payments on the per capita GDP in each province and not get involved in any way in all this convoluted arithmetic. If we know where the GDP of a province is low and where the GDP of a province is high, we shuffle money from the haves to the have nots. We do not have to go through all this. It is becoming something like the Income Tax Act, totally unintelligible. I would like the hon. member's view on that.

My other question is perhaps a little more difficult because it presumes that the formula is the be all and the end all.

I would like to know what effect that specific land claim settlements will have on the equalization formula with the infusion of federal money to buy the land and the gross distortion of the municipal tax base by the creation of these new reserves. Will this, through the formula, create discrepancies or inequalities that we may not be aware of?

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, March 9th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. We seem to be outnumbered by the pages. Do we have a quorum?

And the count having been taken:

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, March 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I have heard some funny things in this House, but the intervention by the hon. member for Broadview—Greenwood in which he suggests that government intervention has been beneficial to the economy of western Canada is one of the funniest that I have ever heard.

He referred specifically to the CPR and to the western oil industry. I grant you that the railways in general owed their existence to the intervention of the federal government, but I would also venture to say that the people of western Canada paid for those interventions tenfold, twentyfold, thirtyfold while they were raped by the railways, by the central Canadian establishment sucking the resources out of the west and putting nothing back.

As far as our oil industry goes, the only federal intervention of any consequence that I am aware of in the petroleum industry was the national energy program, which was designed to murder the oil industry in western Canada and very nearly succeeded. We had refugees from Alberta all over the country trying to escape what was done to the industry by the Liberal predecessor to this federal government.

Because the member for Broadview—Greenwood is acknowledged to be quite knowledgeable on taxation, I would like to put a question to him. If we are going to have equalization payments, and I do not think anybody in any party in this House would say that we should not, why do we have to have these dreadful convoluted formulae tying them to God knows what? Why could we not just simply have a transfer of funds, a cheque from Ottawa to the have not provinces based solely on per capita GDP in those provinces and get away from all of this crazy bureaucracy? Why not?

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, March 9th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I hesitate to get into a wrestling match with one of my colleagues, particularly the member for Elk Island. I have a problem with his proposal as it affects equalization specific to the province of Quebec.

It is my humble belief, if we are to have good relations with Quebec and get back to some degree of amity with that province, that the best way to do it is to revert to the terms of Confederation, to the initial British North American Act, which clearly defined the rights and responsibilities of the provinces and the federal government and apparently with which all parties were quite happy 130 years ago.

When we get into targeted payments for health and education we are in effect overriding the original intent of the BNA act. Would it not be more in keeping with the spirit of Confederation if equalization payments were non-targeted and were ultimately based, as they are now, on income levels in the concerned provinces based on productivity? We can jigger the formulas and put in as many variables as we like, but ultimately they are a measure of productivity and per capita income.

Why not have totally non-targeted contributions from the federal government to the alleged have not provincial governments, rather than specifying this is for health, this is for education and this is for whatever?