Ken Epp

[Sales Tax And Excise Tax Amendments Act, 1999, June 12th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The name of the group represented is the Canadian Alliance.

[Sales Tax And Excise Tax Amendments Act, 1999, June 12th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I really do not believe that who attended what function or how much they paid has any relevance at all to Bill C-24. I ask you to bring the member back on topic.

[Sales Tax And Excise Tax Amendments Act, 1999, June 12th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, normally we would have an opportunity for debate after a speech. I think this is the last of the speeches where we do not. I would not raise this point but I really think he is quite irrelevant vis-à-vis Bill C-24.

[Sales Tax And Excise Tax Amendments Act, 1999, June 12th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to add some comments to the debate on Bill C-24 as reported to the House by the committee.

The parliamentary secretary has just finished giving us a quick summary of some of the main points of the bill. Most of what he has said sounds pretty reasonable. What I find absolutely incredible is that he can say in such nice smooth language what the bill does not say at all. I need to reword that. He described the bill in nice, smooth language but the bill itself is convoluted legalese which I defy even an accountant to understand. It is absolutely incredible.

I have read a number of things in the bill. I will give one little example. One thing the bill does which the parliamentary secretary did not allude to is it clarifies the tax situation with respect to HST and GST when it involves barter exchange. I read it twice and I still cannot clearly understand it. I would have to get a tax lawyer to help me interpret this. I cannot understand whether bartering is out of the tax loop or in. I think it is out as a result of the bill. I will read a little bit of it because it is so incredibly interesting. It reads:

(6) For the purposes of this Part, each of the following is deemed not to be a financial service:

(a) the operation, maintenance or administration of a system of accounts, to which barter units can be credited, of members of a barter exchange network;

(b) the crediting of a barter unit to such an account;

(c) the supply, receipt or redemption of a barter unit; and

(d) the agreeing to provide, or the arranging for, anything referred to in any of paragraphs (a) to (c).

That is clear, is it not? It goes on to state that this section is is deemed to have come into force on December 10, 1998. That was a year and a half ago. It goes on:

(3) If a designation of a barter exchange network under section 181.3 of the Act, as enacted by subsection (1), takes effect on the day on which this Act is assented to, that section applies to the giving of any property, service or money at any time before that day, by a member of the network or the administrator of the network, in exchange for a barter unit that could be used as full or partial consideration for supplies of property or services between members of the network as if the designation and that section had been in effect at that time, provided that no amount was collected as or on account of tax in respect of the supply of the barter unit.

That is perfectly clear. And it goes on and on like that. It is endless.

I stand to be corrected but the bottom line is that if people arrange to have a barter unit established with an administrator, they can so register it. If they then exchange goods and services in return for these so-called barter units, which is perhaps a new currency to be introduced in Canada outside of the Bank Act, then they can exchange those barter units for other activities, services or products and they are not considered taxable.

I would venture to guess that if this is actually implemented in this way, then competing with the loonie will be the boonie, the barter unit. People will be using it in great amounts in order to avoid the GST. Why? It is very clear.

One of the things the parliamentary secretary said was that in order to encourage the use of Canadian facilities for conducting conventions and meetings of international organizations, the GST rules would be altered so there would be a GST exempt portion for those people who are from outside the country. That is a clear admission on the part of the parliamentary secretary that where GST is applied it makes Canada less competitive. The government is ready to remove the GST on that part of it in order to make it more competitive. That makes sense to me.

Generally it is true that the more an activity is taxed, the less there is of that activity. The less the government taxes it, the more it will get of that activity. If international organizations are encouraged to have their meetings here, which of course would bring a lot of money into the community and the country, then reduce the tax.

How I wish we could persuade the federal government to apply that principle to our own citizens. We are taxed to death. The GST is one of those taxes. And this bill does a lot to change the way the GST and now the GST and HST rules are applied.

It is interesting the government would choose to bring in these amendments to the GST. We know the Liberals were first elected to government primarily on the promise that they would eliminate the GST. There are a whole bunch of really good quotations by the Prime Minister when he was in opposition. He said, “I am opposed to the GST. I have always been opposed to it and I will be opposed to it always”. Back in 1990 when the GST was being introduced he said he would always be opposed to the GST. The Liberals at that time were sitting on this side of the House and the Mulroney Conservatives were on the other side and were proposing this wonderful new GST.

After all these years of GST the government in a piecemeal way, one little group at a time, is saying that it should take the GST away because it is unfair, inhibits economic activity, is bad for business, costs the government too much money, or whatever. Now it is introducing some amendments in this bill to change some of the GST rules.

Here is a quotation from the individual who is now the Deputy Prime Minister. On December 21, 1992, he said “The thinking is that we want to get rid of the GST”.

A little less than a year before the 1993 federal election when the present Prime Minister was leader of the opposition he said “We will replace it. No doubt about it”. In retrospect I guess he has a bit of doubt. He also said “We will replace the tax. This is a commitment. You will judge me by that. If the GST is not gone, I will have a tough time in the election after that”.

He further said “The only specific promise I am going to make is to replace the GST”. I guess we have it replaced all right. It is now the GST-HST in those provinces that have bought into it. Instead of being 7% it is 15%. Yes, it was replaced. Was that a great commitment?

Interestingly just weeks after the 1993 election when asked by a reporter what he would do about the GST because of his election promise, the Prime Minister said “It will be gone in two years”. That was 1993. According to very simple arithmetic, much beyond the ken of mathematicians on Liberal side, two years after 1993 is 1995. We would have expected by 1995 that the GST would be gone. Is it gone? I do not think so. It is still here. It is as big as ever.

Let me refer to the Prime Minister speaking in the House Commons. We can look it up in Hansard . In 1994, again just six months after the election, he said “We hate it and we will kill it”. That is what he said in the House of Commons, still thinking about his election campaign, but he never really did it.

Here we are some six and a half years after that election and the Prime Minister and the Liberals have done nothing to change their so-called election promise to get rid of the GST but they are removing it.

How can I stand in the House and either speak or vote against a reduction of GST as applied to vehicles needed by people who are handicapped? One would have to be very thoughtless to say no. If someone is handicapped and needs a special vehicle to haul them around, it would be wrong to say that we think the federal government should get some GST money out of that vehicle or the extra fittings required to make it work for them.

I will have a little dilemma because I will vote against the bill due to all its flaws. Despite that, it is like eating tapioca pudding that has some gravel in it. In this case some of the good tasting parts are the reduction of the GST for people who have special needs because they have disabilities. To exempt them from GST is the right thing to do, but how about all the other people who have needs?

How about students who have to pay GST on books? To add insult to injury, they are now paying it two, three and four times. Let us take a look at our pages in the House, young people who are students. When they buy a used book they end up paying GST on a book that has already had GST paid on it. I know all of them would love to keep the books they used when they were students in their youth as an ongoing building of their personal libraries. However they will not be able to because of the high cost of education. They will put their books up for sale. Those books, which have had the GST paid on them when they were new and first bought, will have the GST paid on them again the third time, the fourth time and however many times they are recycled.

If students who are trying to obtain an education are charged GST on books every time the books are moved from one owner to the other, the word I use is greed. It was invented by the Prime Minister. It was used by him just a couple of weeks ago. He talked about people who want to keep some of their own earnings as being greedy.

I say it is a greedy government that does not have consideration for young people trying to get an education. It insists on taxing them to death on their earnings and then when they use the earnings that are left over for the books they need for their education they are charged GST on them. There is nothing in the bill about reducing the GST to zero on reading materials and on books. To me that is a huge flaw. That alone is a good reason to vote against the bill. It is totally inadequate in that regard.

A number of other things in the bill are commendable and a number of them are very questionable. As legislators in the country we have an obligation to stop the huge tax bite. The little things that the government does from time to time by changing a little tax rule here and a little tax rule there do not make it any simpler. In fact it greatly increases the complexity. It does not relieve Canadian taxpayers of their crushing tax burden in any substantial way. It is just a little dithering and nothing substantial happening.

I cannot stand in the House to talk about a budget implementation bill, some of which goes all the way back to 1990, believe it or not, without also mentioning that the Canadian Alliance has a very good tax plan that has the approval of many Canadians and many notable economists including Dr. Mundell, a Nobel Prize winner. He said that our plan was workable, that it would give a substantial kick to the economy and that it would give real tax relief to Canadian families who are struggling to make ends meet. That is the type of tax overhaul the country needs.

Of course we have critics who say a flat tax is only a tax cut for the rich. They try to make political hay out of that. I do not apologize for the fact that under our plan everyone pays less taxes. The fact of the matter is that the Liberals always misrepresent this aspect of our plan incorrectly. The Minister of Finance particularly loves to talk about it. He gives a totally false message that it is for rich people only.

Contrary to the Liberals, we would take some two million Canadian taxpayers off the tax rolls completely, those people who make less than $20,000 for their families per year and are deprived of at least $6 billion of their earnings by this government. Six billion dollars of tax revenue comes from Canadian families whose family income is less than $20,000 a year. It is shameful, absolutely shameful.

Our tax plan would give them a 100% tax break. It is true that when people earn more money they would pay the same rate of tax on all their earnings. That does not mean that people who make more money pay less. They pay proportionately more. It is a truly progressive system. Anyone who says otherwise is not staying with the facts but is distorting them.

I emphasize that this is the way to go. It has the approval of no less than the WEFA group, which has done financial studies for the Department of Finance and the Minister of Finance in the production of his budget and his income projections for the government. By using that same model and running our proposal we showed that every year tax revenue to the government would go up. That is even before we take into account the boost that a massive tax break would give to our economy.

Government revenue would go up. There would be more money available for health care and education. There would be less money under our plan for boondoggles and for building fountains in Shawinigan. The money would dry up for fountains very quickly if we were in power because we simply do not believe it is correct to use the hard earned money of long suffering taxpayers to try to bolster the re-election chances of anyone including the Prime Minister.

We would straighten all those things out. With us at the helm of government, Canadians would find some real tax changes and changes to the system, not just the tinkering around the government is prone to doing. It sort of dilly-dallies and never really gets around to doing anything substantial.

I would like to say a little about some of the other matters that are involved. There is a whole bunch of provisions in the bill on changing different things including charities. The parliamentary secretary alluded to that point, but there is one that is really interesting. It would exempt second language training in French or English from the GST if that training were provided by vocational schools or individual contractors.

That is a step in the right direction, but once again the Liberals are guilty of tinkering. What they have done is said that students studying math or science have to pay the GST on that. However, French speaking people learning English or English speaking people learning French will be exempt from GST on that. They just cannot do that. They cannot just pepper away—I guess the Prime Minister likes pepper—at wee spots in the Income Tax Act and exempt this group, exempt that group and double the tax on this group and so on.

We need a massive overhaul, one that is consistent, one that is logical, one that makes sense, one that helps the economy, one that leaves more of the money people have earned in their own pockets and puts the country at a competitive edge such that it has never seen.

I would like to see the country run ahead in terms of its economic activity per capita vis-à-vis the United States and other G-7 countries and our trading partners. We have the potential to achieve that. We have a vigorous, well trained population. We have a wealth of resources unmatched in the world.

Despite the fact that Liberal members are all sort of shaking in their pants these days, we have a relatively stable political country. Our political regime is relatively stable. We change our governments by election. I always say we do it with ballots instead of with bullets. That is something we want to preserve in Canada.

We have all these positive things going for us, but what do we have? We have a country that is struggling, a country where our young people find it impossible to get jobs. They are lured to the United States because of lower taxes and higher salary offers. We keep on struggling in this country because of our excessive tax regime. I think we need to pay attention to the facts here and not put our heads in the sand any longer.

I know there are many Liberals in the House who would just love for me to carry on for a long time, but I will have to disappoint the vast majority over there. I will stop at this stage and say that I will be voting against this bill for the reasons I have mentioned. I will also continue to press forward for a new system, a new regime in this country, a system that is fair, that bolsters our economy and that leaves more of the people's hard earned money in their pockets so they can provide for their own needs and the needs of their families.

[Species At Risk Act, June 12th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I have a serious question to ask the member who just spoke. He did a great job in his presentation. However, before I ask the question, I remember reading not long ago on the Internet a dilemma: What does one do if one finds an animal that is an endangered species eating a plant that has been defined as being endangered? It is one of those deep thoughts to ponder.

My serious question pertains to a question that one of my farmer friends in my constituency asked. He wanted to know, if he could somehow be shown, either directly or indirectly, to be responsible for the danger and perhaps the killing of a member of an endangered species, and if he could lose his farm over that, because the proposed fines are of the magnitude that would basically put the farmer out of business, what would be his recourse?

He said that perhaps there would be a series of unintended consequences from the bill, that when farmers make sure that the margins of their sloughs and so on become totally uninhabitable so that those endangered species do not even go there, there will actually be less available land for endangered species than there is now.

I would ask for my colleague's comments on that, if he has some knowledge of it.

[Cultural Industry, June 9th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to represent the wonderful people of the riding of Elk Island in the debate on a motion put forward by the hon. member for Kamloops, Thompson and Highland Valleys.

The motion is very interesting. The hon. member is proposing that some people in the country who are not making enough money to make a decent living should have a tax break. I have to say that I very much agree with that part of the motion.

The hon. member is talking about people in the arts and entertainment industry. People are working full time trying to make a living and sometimes their income level is really challenged. It is very tough for them to make ends meet, yet the Liberals are still quite content to reach into those people's pockets and take some of their meagre earnings and use them to build fountains in Shawinigan and other projects of their liking.

I find this really passing strange. It is an interesting comment on the Prime Minister and on Liberal thinking when we contemplate what the Prime Minister said in Europe just a few days ago. He said something about people who want to keep more of their own earnings being greedy. That was the word he used.

An artist who makes $13,000 or $15,000 a year has to pay several hundred dollars in income tax so that the Prime Minister can take the money to spend in his riding. He attributes the word greed to the artist who would like to keep some of his or her own earnings, but he somehow does not see that there is any element of greed in his own wanting to use that very same money for his nefarious purposes.

I also think of single moms. There are many single parents and most of them are single moms. Many of them make less than $20,000 yet the Liberal government with its so-called social conscience is quite content to lift from the pockets of those people who make less than $20,000 a year some $6 billion or $7 billion a year in income tax. How shameful.

An NDP member is saying that we need to be less greedy and let artists keep more of their earnings. I simply say it is time we replaced the Liberal government which cannot see past anything that moves without wanting to regulate it and tax it. In principle I agree with what the NDP member is proposing in the motion, which is is to reduce taxes, particularly for those people who have a very limited income.

I could hardly let this moment pass by without mentioning our solution 17. For all intents and purposes it would take almost two million taxpayers off the tax rolls completely, giving them a 100% reduction in taxes. When the Liberals knock our solution 17 plan, they are trying to get a message to Canadians to be suspicious of our plan, to not accept it and to not trust us to form the government. I really wonder about the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister who will not openly and honestly deal with the facts and let the people of Canada decide. Instead they paint a bunch of pictures of our plan which are quite different from what the plan actually is.

There is no doubt that low income Canadians, among them artists, need a substantial tax break. The member for Kamloops, Thompson and Highland Valleys has suggested that the tax break should be 100% up to $30,000 of earnings. I have a bit of a problem with that. As much as I agree with the concept of reducing the taxes, I am not in favour of saying let us find which groups we should give this benefit to.

The Liberals like to line up different groups based on their race. They say that one race will have a better advantage over another one when it comes to hiring or benefits and other things with respect to the government. The NDP would probably look at people in terms of need, but it is only prepared to look at some individuals who have needs. In this case it is looking at people in the artistic community.

Let us not hesitate to say it does not matter whether the person is an artist, a mechanic, an unemployed nurse or a part time worker at a fast food place. If the person does not make enough money to adequately provide for his or her family, then there is still something fundamentally wrong with the government taking a certain portion of the earnings and saying that it wants it anyway.

The concept of increasing the basic exemption is very good. This is where solution 17 shines. For an individual, we would take that basic exemption right up to $10,000. Many students, artists and other people who have a small income would be totally exempt from paying federal income tax, which is as it should be. The remainder would pay the lowest rate. We are currently proposing 17% for that rate. That is why we have named it solution 17.

Artists of course have other things that affect them. Depending on the area where their work takes place, many of them incur expenses while they are producing their art. Whether one is a writer or a painter, it sometimes takes a year or two or three to earn an income. Producing the work takes that much time and it is only when the work is sold that there is income.

Perhaps we would be much wiser if we looked not only at artists, but at people whose income falls into the category of a large income over longer intervals of time and no income for a long time and then a spurt of larger income and then again a time of limited or no income.

Perhaps we should re-design our income tax system so there can be some long term averaging of both income and expenses. The annual exemption of our proposed $10,000 per year would in effect give the artist a $30,000 exemption over three years, the time that it takes to produce the work.

Obviously we need to deal with this issue not only for artists but for all Canadians. Although I agree in principle with what the hon. member is trying to do, I am going to have to vote against the motion. The simple reason is that I do not think it is right to single out one occupational group as a favoured group who can earn up to $30,000 without paying income tax, but everyone else regardless of how poor they are or what their obligations are to their children and families have to pay taxes on an amount of money after whatever the basic exemption is.

The basic exemption is around $8,000 under the Liberals. It would be $10,000 per adult under our plan. A family, a mom and a dad and two kids, under our plan would have a tax free income up to $26,000. That is very close to what the hon. member is proposing for artists. The difference is that our plan would apply to everyone in that income category. That would be a much more fair way of dealing with it.

I regret that my time is up. I would like to talk a bit more about some of the supports that are available to artists but I will have to leave that for other members.

[Crimes Against Humanity Act, June 9th, 2000]

Madam Speaker, I rise to speak to this bill with some trepidation because of the largely emotional aspect of it.

Many years ago there was a song that was sung on the radio. It went, “Ain't going to study war no more”. I will not sing it because that may affect negatively on the people on the other side of the House who may rise in derision at my attempt to sing. It was a spiritual song, “Ain't going to study war no more”.

Without exception, all thinking people, all people with any conscience at all, will agree that war is terribly bad. It is really wrong. It is as great an evil as we can think of. Even if it involves only the people who are enlisted, it still involves humans pointing weapons at their fellow humans with the intent to kill them, and success goes to the one who wipes out the other side.

It is a great aberration to our society. It is one that would drive humanists to despair. For many years the humanists have said that we as a humanity are getting better and better but it is quite clear that is not happening. If I were a humanist in the sense of that being a religious faith, my faith would be severely shaken because of the atrocities that have continued through the ages and which continue to this very day. Quite clearly war crimes, atrocities committed in war and indeed even atrocities that are committed outside of war are abhorrent to us.

I think of another phrase. There are some things that are so evil, so offensive, that it is even difficult for us to speak about them. The atrocities of war certainly come into that category. I find it difficult to even think about them let alone speak about them.

I happen to be sandwiched between two generations that have firsthand experience with this. My grandparents and parents were in the middle of such atrocities. My parents were in their very early teens when they escaped from what we affectionately call the old country. They did so under the threat of losing their lives if they stayed. They were able to escape. I have said in the House many times and I will never stop saying it, how grateful I am that their escape was successful, that my grandparents made the decision to make Canada their home and that Canada, with its arms wide open for refugees, accepted our family. I will be forever grateful for that.

I said I was sandwiched between two generations which have had firsthand experience with this. The other side of it is the experiences of my son, who I suppose picked up some of our family values. He spent one summer while he was at university working in third world countries with a Christian relief agency. The stories he told of things that he observed firsthand are enough to make one cry. It is impossible to imagine the things that humans will do to one another. I want to relate just a few.

With a name like Epp, it is not to be unexpected that I have some Mennonite heritage, since that name appears quite frequently in Mennonite circles. My family members in southern Russia at the end of the first world war and during the time of the Russian revolution were considered to be enemies of the revolution because they would not take up arms in order to annihilate fellow human beings. They thought that was morally wrong so they would not do it. As a result my family and all other Mennonite families were considered by the revolutionaries to be enemies of the revolution. Hence they became targets.

Many times late at night, sometimes after midnight, their homes would be attacked by the revolutionaries. Because they knew that the people who inhabited those homes were not for the revolution, they were simply taken out and shot. Three of my maternal grandfather's brothers lost their lives. It was a miracle that my grandfather survived in that particular occurrence. There were many other cases.

I read not too long ago The Diary of Anna Baerg who underwent some of these atrocities and wrote about them in a diary not unlike The Diary of Anne Frank . I recommend that book to all members. As a matter of fact, the government House leader had a copy of that book and lent it to me since he knew of my interest in it. I read the book carefully and with great interest because it represented the things that my own family went through.

She relates some of the atrocities about the people who were summarily shot, people she knew and lived with, her neighbours. She indicated how one girl was not shot. She said in her book that there are some things worse than death, and Madam Speaker, you and I know what she is talking about. I cannot help but grieve when I think of the things people are willing to do to others.

My son worked in different places in Africa, in southern Sudan, Somalia and Rwanda. He worked in Croatia. In Croatia a home was set up for women who suffered terribly in the conflict. He told me stories that broke my heart about things that were done to children while their mothers watched. The stories are so detestable that I cannot and will not speak about them though the picture is very vivid in my mind.

I do not know what the answer is. We have before us a bill to bring to justice the people who do these things.

My son and his wife went to Rwanda. The government provided them with a school so they could provide housing for the hundreds of children whose parents were killed in the conflict. To kill parents in front of their children and to leave the children on their own is a huge atrocity.

My son and his wife had as their first job to clean the school. The school was filled with bullet holes. The enemies had entered the school when it was in operation and when the so-called soldiers left, every student and teacher in the school had been shot and subsequently died. My son's job was to clean up all the mess on the walls. That school was used to house the children and give them some shelter and love.

Madam Speaker, I see your signal and cannot believe that I have only covered my preamble.

Canada's involvement in reducing the crime of war throughout the country is what we should be emphasizing. Let us help to spread the message of love and forgiveness and learn to live with one another so these things do not happen. Yes, we must to the degree that we are able, help to restrain the evil which pervades our country and our very world and which leads to the hideous atrocities committed against women, children and men.

[The Economy, June 9th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, let me put the facts on the table. Our plan has the approval of no less than economist Robert Mundell, a Nobel prize winner, who said that it was a very good and workable plan. Furthermore, we ran the econometric model, the same model the finance minister uses with his plan to parliament, WEFA—

[The Economy, June 9th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, it seems that some correctly predicted that the Liberal Party would be duplicitous about the facts in this statement.

[The Economy, June 9th, 2000]

Mr. Speaker, it seems that the government is engaging in a pre-emptive strike of misinformation about our plan 17. It is really unfortunate because the Minister of Finance is stating things publicly that misrepresent what the plan actually says.

For example, he implied that government revenues would go down $20 billion under our plan. The truth is that over five years, while reducing the tax rates to 17%, government revenue would increase every year. Where does the Minister of Finance get his numbers from?