Vic Althouse

[Child Care, October 28th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, last summer the 11 ministers of agriculture agreed to a set of rural initiatives which was to include a rural child care action plan. The department of human resources has apparently allocated something like $720 million to provide some 150,000 child care spaces and so far there is no indication of how much of that will go to rural areas.

I would appreciate it if the government and the minister in charge would give more consideration to the existing rural child care models. They are experimental.

Langruth, Manitoba has an active plan. This community of some 500 souls has provided a model of child care which goes beyond day care. It is working and needs special financing. It does not cost more than the other type but it needs recognition that the requirements are-

[Department Of Canadian Heritage Act, October 27th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I am generally not considered an expert on culture and the heritage department. I am a farmer from Saskatchewan. However I do read. I do write. I do look at art. I do watch plays. I do watch television and all the things that all Canadians do.

In this discussion we should remind ourselves that cultural pursuits are an expression of all of society and they have always had difficulty being recognized for what they are trying to do.

We have heard a number of speeches this morning stating that if the market will not support it then it should not be produced. Yet when I look back at my very modest understanding of the history of artistic endeavour, I see a great many works that are now considered to be the epitome of that genre of art. It would not have been accepted by the market in the day it was produced. It was very controversial and yet because the state or the church was determined to pay the artist to do the work and support the artist in his or her endeavour it was produced.

People asked why waste money painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, paying an artist for the years and years it takes to produce that stuff. When it was finished the population was agog because Michelangelo had painted some of the people without as many clothes on as they thought there should be. While the church and the Pope had financed the project, they did succumb to popular pressure and have him come back and paint over some parts of it.

However without the backing of the state or the church-in that case the church was collecting money from all of the population-without a firm commitment to that artist, we would not know Michelangelo ever existed. He is still considered to be one of the greatest painters and sculptors of all time.

That is just one example. We have many in Canada to which I am sure people in the artistic community could point. Because most of my friends of the Reform Party are from western Canada I would just mention the name William Kurelek .Without some assistance from Canadian governments we probably would not realize that William Kurelek was a great talent in his own right. He was considered kind of a nut case by his colleagues and the people who knew him, but some people in the artistic community convinced others he should receive financial support, so we got the paintings that he produced in his lifetime.

We tend to think that Heritage Canada is only supporting experimental art and playing with new ideas, that they support exotica or things that are quite foolish. We have heard quite a lot of some of those perceived to be foolish things. Not being terribly modern and culturally aware, some of those seem a little foolish to me as well, but we have to be prepared to make those kinds of experiments if we are going to move forward as a society.

As we have only eight to ten minutes each to speak I do not want to spend too much time on this, but we should remind ourselves that some of what Heritage Canada does with its grants and its money is quite mundane. If we pulled back all the support the department gives, even my friends in the Reform Party would up on their feet crying about the interference that had been precipitated by the pulling back of those funds.

As an example, I have in my community a second newspaper that started up in the last few years which portrays a very right wing point of view. My friends in the Reform Party would love the editorials. Basically the reason for the newspaper is to put those editorials and those opinions in front of the general public in that community. Because this lady has these extreme views she has trouble getting advertisers to support the paper.

She wanted to set up a second paper and keep it going. She had started one up in a neighbouring community which was in danger of folding so she took over the management of it again. I got a call from her to say she was having trouble getting the postal subsidy needed to keep both newspapers going. This comes from, guess where? Heritage Canada. As I recall it is about 88 cents per paper per week. The paper cannot operate and cannot circulate this other opinion in those communities without the support of Heritage Canada.

While she is an avowed believer in letting the market be determined, she was very concerned as well about the duality of these arguments we get into and the fact that she might not be able to get a grant from Heritage Canada because she was starting up a second paper and policies were changing. This in effect would be a restriction of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is only one forum of the freedom of expression our societies and the tribes we have come from feel is the root of our existence.

If we are going to have freedom of expression it has to go beyond just producing newspapers with a point of view. It ultimately has to include putting paintings on ceilings, even though it was thought to be a stupid place to put a painting, and living with the kind of criticism that even that glorious work in the Sistine Chapel got when it was performed. Sometimes backing off from criticism has happened, with a little paint here and there to cover up what the general public is opposed to and making adjustments but not by withdrawing all support from society in general.

I hope in opposing the restructuring of Heritage Canada that some of my friends in the House do not mean that all forms of support would stop. Even as a group, we are not wise enough to recognize a potential talent or a product of the artistic mind that will fly and be famous for centuries.

One time as a farm boy I was able to get to Paris for a day or two and go through the Louvre. There are many works I remember of course. Everyone sees the "Mona Lisa" and wonders at the Dutch masters and the works of the French, the Spanish and the Italians. However, the one thing I personally admired was some of the sculpture in stone from the early Greek period. Some of this stuff weighs thousands of pounds. The art is so great it appears as if these winged creatures will take off momentarily. They look as light as a feather, they are ethereal. They almost look like lace, but they are stone and weigh thousands of pounds. Nobody knows who did that work. But we still have it and we still admire it.

Some time thousands of years ago, some king or priest or bishop or whoever helped to finance this work of art. It was probably criticized by a few people in the street or maybe all the people in the street as a waste of public funds for keeping this poor sculptor in food and drink for the time it took him or her to produce it. Nobody knows who produced it and yet millions have appreciated the thought and the expertise and the feeling that went with it.

To be so careful with our dollars and cents that we lose all common sense has to be something we avoid. I hope for just a few political moments, we will let common sense prevail and not just follow public demand. The public demand to stop spending is always there from the taxpayers' side of our psyche. We also must remember we have more than that in our individuality and in our group consciousness and in our group needs. We

must recognize that this also includes recognizing freedom of expression and supporting it.

[Questions On The Order Paper, October 7th, 1994]

Briefly, Mr. Speaker, I am glad the member raised the problem of eliciting information from the agency involved, which was the Grain Transportation Agency under the WGTA, from whom a joint committee of agriculture and transport last May 6 found similar problems in getting information.

They have urged the Minister of Transport to immediately appoint another person to take over from the WGTA the administration and control of the allocation of the grain car fleet in order to ensure that an adequate supply of rolling stock will be provided to producers for the efficient, reliable and effective movement of grain.

Their response to my questions, which indicated they had no idea how many cars they had in the system or where they were, adds fuel to that. This was the finding of the joint committee as well. I think-

[Questions On The Order Paper, October 7th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I note that the parliamentary secretary has asked that all questions be permitted to stand. I know that is the standard procedure. We also have an understanding in the House, in fact an order, that says that responses are to be made within 45 days.

I am sorry to take some time but I wish to point out an experience I had recently. Just last week some questions were reported from me.

As you are probably aware, Mr. Speaker, compound questions no longer seem to be permitted. If we have a question that has three or four elements, we have to use up the four spaces in our question quota all at once. Then we sit and fidget for 45 days, hoping that eventually the paper will clear and we can ask more questions. Last week I was faced with having to wait 135 days, which means that I am effectively muzzled for three times as long as I ought to be.

To add insult to injury three of those questions elicited the response that the department, the ministry and the agencies did not have the data to provide answers. Why did I have to wait 135 days for the department to know it had no answers?

I urge the parliamentary secretary and the government to respond much more promptly, particularly where they have no answer, because they are effectively treading very close to the privileges of members' rights to information in this Chamber. By their slowness they have effectively kept me from looking for answers to further questions for almost 100 extra days beyond what should have been my right as a parliamentarian.

I am not raising this as a question of privilege at this time, but I ask that the parliamentary secretary urge the departments to be much more prompt and forthcoming in their responses and if they do not have answers to let us know immediately.

[Canada Grain Act, October 4th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the remarks of the hon. member. I have two questions on the many arguments he made.

He said that the problem of the grain companies having difficulty setting tariffs for new services was now to be resolved by simply not having them report these services to the grain commission and that it would be completely deregulated. I wonder if he would give the House some idea of what the new services might be that would require charges that are not being made now.

The second matter that got my attention was his argument that unlike at the turn of the century grain companies are now quite scrupulous in their dealings with their customers and their farm deliverers. I remind him that a number of grain companies operate internationally. Those operating in both Canada and the United States, as an example, each year have been found to be shorting customers on weight, delivering the wrong grades, shorting farmers on payments and so on.

His faith in the modern day elevator company is really one of having faith in a very good policeman, namely the Canadian Grain Commission which will be backing off and not be patrolling the neighbourhood so fully. Many grain companies may find it much easier to revert to the practices they engage in outside Canada as soon as the grain commission backs off. Would the member comment on those two items?

[Canada Grain Act, October 4th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to hear that the member for Prince Albert-Churchill River still believes that his government is acting on behalf of farmers.

It seems to me that this bill and its two companions which were introduced this fall have made a fairly sizeable shift toward dealing with the agri-food and the agri-business side of agriculture in providing protections and provisions for their needs sometimes at the expense of the farmer.

Just as a brief illustration of that, I wonder if he would explain to us, since he raised it in his speech, how open-ended fees being set by elevators in terminals are a help to farmers. How is it a help to a farmer to deliver grain to an elevator for use at the terminal and find out that the fees have been changed after he gets the product into the system?

[Transport, October 3rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the Western Grain Transportation Act was presented by a past Liberal government as a new balance between the needs for railway revenues and the legislative guarantees to farmers in the historic crow benefit.

The Minister of Transport has made cuts to the farmers' side of the equation and is proposing to stop the payments altogether.

What is the government proposing for the various lucrative formula induced revenues that the railways receive under that same legislation?

[Transport, October 3rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, in the absence of the Minister of Transport and the Prime Minister, my question is for the Deputy Prime Minister.

[Income Tax Act, October 3rd, 1994]

moved:

That, in the opinion of this House, the government should consider the advisability of introducing amendments to the Income Tax Act so that taxpayers whose income may fluctuate from one year to the next would be able to average their income over five years.

Madam Speaker, I introduced this motion some time ago and it was drawn within the last year. The reasons for the motion are fairly clear-cut. It is based on the assumption that the Canadian economy is much more diverse than what some of our policy makers perceive it to be over the last number of years.

We still have literally hundreds of thousands of individuals who are basically self-employed, who work to fulfil a dream of producing what they want to produce on the hope and the assumption that the price or the value of that production will go up or on the hope that they will eventually be able to produce enough of the product to make it an economically viable entity.

While the Canadian economy may have become more industrial and more global, there are still many people who work on this basis. They are farmers, fishermen, real estate brokers, builders, prospectors, architects, artists, musicians and a host of others who sometimes work years without any real remuneration. Eventually the big income year comes and they have in the past been encouraged in their activities which are useful to the whole of Canadian society with the concept of income averaging.

There is a great deal of income fluctuation in some of the sectors of our economy simply because of changes in production due to cyclical weather patterns whether it is in fishing, farming, forestry or a whole host of other businesses attached to those. There is also fluctuation as world prices go up and down. No matter how efficient a producer one is of wood products or agricultural products or fish products, when the world price is down one is going to show a loss.

However those people do not give up and quit simply because they have a loss in one year. They know that it will turn around. They hope that it will turn around. They realize that their activities are of use to society in general. People have to eat. People need wood for their houses and for their shelter and so they continue.

I brought the motion to the House because we once had three methods of averaging income for the diverse group of people who have up and down incomes. We had general averaging which was available to all taxpayers. At one point it was actually worked out by the department itself when incomes exceeded 120 per cent of the previous year. It was almost automatic.

We had for a while income averaging using annuity contracts which was introduced for a few years. We had five-year block averaging for farmers and fisherpeople.

I want to do a bit of past history of these with a brief explanation because in 20 minutes one cannot do justice to the issue. Prior to June 1992 general averaging, as I said, was available to all. We could go back five years and pay not only income but losses in those five years. This was finally replaced in 1982 with something called forward averaging.

However even tax experts admit this is only helpful when incomes decrease significantly so that a person can be put into a lower tax bracket. It is used by retirees, by athletes who are on their way out, by people who are pulling back rather than to encourage production which is what the original averaging plans did.

Tax experts like Beam and Laiken conclude that the forward averaging has not been a suitable replacement and has not done the job it was hoped it would do.

The income averaging annuity contracts which I mentioned were available as well were of very limited use. They were used for the collapsing of RRSPs when people reached the age of 70 or 71 years.

It was used for the utilization of capital gains provisions which were changed in 1982. It is probably not used very much

any more. It was basically a way of permitting people to adjust to the capital gains provisions in 1982 and some later budgets.

The five-year block averaging which had been available to farmers and fishermen lasted a bit longer. Although it was announced in the budget of 1982 it officially ended in 1987, which means that the last year most people could use it was 1991.

There are some exceptions to that such as in cases in which taxpayers had such low incomes they did not bother filing a return. That is not considered to be one of the years. If they did not file a return in 1988, for instance, they could go until 1992. If they happened to miss three or four years they might still be eligible to pick up on those last remnants of five-year block averaging simply because they have to use five years when they file on time. These could have high incomes or losses and they could all be averaged out.

We need to look at what the replacements for five-year block averaging were. The block averaging has been replaced with a form of forward averaging. There have been a couple of inventory rule changes that were supposed to pick up the slack for farmers and fishermen. While they are helpful in the short term they do not meet all of the advantages that were there for the five-year block averaging.

There is a mandatory inventory adjustment for people with off farm incomes. This is almost all farmers now. Last year we are told that the average family farm incomes were in the neighbourhood of $43,000, of which just over $30,000 came from off farm sources. Therefore on average on farm income was about $13,000 and roughly $30,000 came from off farm sources.

It is interesting to note that a lot of economists and government policy makers seem to think that the answer is to move to larger farms so that incomes can be generated from those larger farms. At least that is the theory. The reality is that when we look at the data the larger the farm, the larger the off farm income. It is virtually impossible to generate a family income from farms regardless of the size under the economic conditions that have existed for the last several years in Canada.

The second inventory adjustment program allows bringing in livestock, which seems to be defined by the courts as anything that is a living, sensate being, from rabbits to fish to ostriches and llamas as well as the usual horses, cows, pigs, sheep, et cetera.

Some difficulties with the program have been discovered, since a cash accounting method has been permitted. This is a good thing for most farm operators, especially individual operators who are not incorporated. That method of computing income is still available. It allows some transferring of income from one year to the next by selling in one year but collecting the money the following year for livestock sales and grains and oilseeds.

This is a possibility in most regions of the country. These provisions do not recognize the fact of wide income variations that were handled under the old five-year block averaging system. It might mitigate a sudden income surge at the end of a year and allow some of that income to be shoved into the following year. It does not take into account the large cyclical changes in prices which are then reflected in huge cyclical changes to income for farmers and fishermen which usually ride for three to five years.

The five-year averaging provision permitted people to hang in there. Perhaps they would lose money for five years, hoping they would recover in a subsequent five years. This allowed for a shifting of income over the five years and paying the tax accordingly.

The new provision does not permit that kind of flexibility and has provided some real horror stories where the lives of farmers or ranchers are interrupted. They leave an estate which can find itself paying unwarranted amounts of taxes because of the legal work that may not have been done in the proper sequence according to the department of revenue. If step a is taken before step b the department will double tax.

Paying taxes should not depend on a chance happening initiated unwittingly by so-called professionals acting on behalf of taxpayers or their estates. Rules should be as simple and as clear as is possible. The block averaging is relatively simple in its concept, in that it applies to the total income of the taxpayer and not just the part that exceeded a certain threshold amount. It permits a complete levelling of net incomes over the averaging period, including the offsetting of losses within the period against profits.

Prior to its demise in 1982 block averaging had existed since 1946. It had accomplished a fairly progressive and widespread growth in the economy. It should be used again in the 1990s in recognition of the continued need in our country for the recognition that there is a wide and diverse choice of economic activities that Canadians choose to be engaged in, or are sometimes forced into, which recognizes that some necessary and crucial economic activities have periods of poor returns but that society must permit some recognition through the tax system we continue to need that we need these people for the smooth and efficient working of our society in general.

Most of the groups I have mentioned in regard to tax averaging are not eligible for most of the so-called safety nets that our society takes pride in providing. Most of them are self-employed individuals ineligible for unemployment insurance benefits. Most do not quality for welfare even though their

incomes are definitely poverty level from parts of their income cycle, sometimes for three to five years.

I argue that the government should consider the advisability of reintroducing income averaging provisions once again to recognize that fluctuating incomes are a reality for a great many productive individuals in our Canadian system. Fair treatment demands that it be given a higher priority if Canada is once again to flourish.

[Questions On The Order Paper, September 27th, 1994]

How many additional hopper cars have each of the railways leased for use in the grain trade this year compared to each of the previous three years?