Madam Speaker, then I will rise on debate.
The government wants to close the debate and get on with the vote, and I suppose in a way I do not blame it, since we have already filed our income taxes which concern this bill. I do not understand exactly what the government is doing. We thought we would be using the day to debate this issue, to talk about taxes and the measures the government is using, and here we are with a very flagrant motion to stop the debate and to basically shut off our discussion on this whole topic.
I wish that people in Canada knew what was going on in the country. We have a lot of members who are very upset. I am talking about members of our society, our citizens and taxpayers. They are very concerned because we have a government that insists on taxing them to death. At every turn there is another tax. There is a tax on a tax. The governments of the past 30 years have not done a thing about this. They have simply been riding roughshod over taxpayers.
This Liberal government has brought in a bill to implement parts of the Income Tax Act provisions from the 1998 budget after the provisions have already been put into practice. That probably puts the thumb on the whole issue of why we are in such trouble in this country. These Liberals want to pass themselves off across the country as having been successful in bringing our fiscal house into order. That is what they keep crowing about.
The fact of the matter is that we have more debt than we did when the Liberals first took office, about $180 billion more. We have higher interest payments on the debt as a result, even though we are blessed these days with low interest rates. We have an endless stream of taxes and user fees. The average Canadian family has at least $3,000 less than it had when the Liberals took office.
I believe that the way parliament works is the root of the problem. We have no mechanism by which the taxpayers can be represented here, no mechanism at all. Many members over there would argue that is not true. The Liberal government represents the government and its wishes. Liberals vote the way the Prime Minister or the finance minister directs them. They will acknowledge that they do not represent the people, that they vote on these issues the way they are told to. Surely it must be the role of the opposition to represent the people here. That is fine, but the frustration is that we on this side get up to speak on behalf of taxpayers, we speak on behalf of students, we speak on behalf of those people who are laying on cots in hospital hallways, we speak until our voices are hoarse, but no one listens. No one does anything about it. Then, when it comes time to vote, we are routinely outvoted simply because we do not have quite enough members here yet.
I am looking forward to the day when we have members in this House of Commons on the government side who, in contrast to the Liberals and the Conservatives, are dedicated and committed to representing the people who sent them here, to representing the taxpayer and the call for lower taxes, for fairness in taxation and decency in the way the government spends our money, not the flippant kind of spending that we see over and over again from this government. It is really atrocious that the government keeps doing these things and not listening to taxpayers.
I will refer briefly to a newspaper clipping, the headline of which indicates that 85% of Canadians are upset by the tax bite. I suppose that no one would really ever say that they love taxes. If I earn money and someone has the legislative right in this country to take it away from me, I suppose, no matter how good the cause, there is going to be a certain degree of resistance to that. However, we ought to pay attention when the headline says that 85% of Canadians are upset. In the text of the clipping it says that these people are very concerned about taxes. They are upset by them. In that scale of question, half of Canadians said they were very upset or extremely upset. The reason is twofold. The total tax bite is too high. Together the different levels of government take too great a proportion of our earnings. It is around 50%. It takes until July 1. Maybe that is why it is called Canada Day. We work from January to July just to pay our taxes.
It is little wonder that the proportion of families who have two earners instead of only one is being increased so much, against the will and the choice of many Canadians. They simply have to do that in order to pay their taxes.
I have mentioned in the House before that my wife and I decided she would be a full time mom. What did I do? I had to get an evening job to supplement the income. I used to tell people that I worked on Tuesday night for Trudeau and on Thursday night for my family. Back in Trudeau's time it was already that bad.
Has it been alleviated? Did nine years of Conservative government solve the problem? I think not. We had a massive increase in our national debt under that administration. Have the Liberals solved the problem? They want people to think they have. I suppose reluctantly we ought to say, thank goodness, at least they did not spend the surplus that was dumped into their lap through lower taxes, particularly in Ontario and Alberta, and more competitive and better trade because of the free trade agreement. The Liberals were against it, but it has been a bit of a saviour for our country and our economy.
It is incredible that these people want us to believe they have done anything. I insist that the budget is balanced these days despite the government. If we had not had this government we would have been way further ahead now.
I find it atrocious that the government has absolutely no plan to reduce the debt. Over 30% of our tax dollars go to pay interest. That is a direct transfer of wealth from ordinary Canadians who are earning it to the pockets of the bankers and the rich people who have more money than they need.
We have poor people who are hardly able to make ends meet. They have to pay atrocious rates of taxes, one-third of which go to interest payments on the debt. Does the finance minister or the Liberal government have any plan to reduce that debt? The answer is no, they do not have a plan.
I have a copy of the figures taken from the budget. This happens to be the 1999 budget, but the comments are still appropriate, even though we are talking here about the 1998 budget. It is the same thing. I am looking at the net public debt numbers.
It is true that the deficit has gone down, but what has happened to the public debt? What is the plan? The net public debt in 1998 was $579.7 billion. What is the plan for 1998-99, which is the budget we are talking about? It is right in the document, $579.7 billion. It is exactly the same number. What is the plan for 1999-2000, the budget which the finance minister gave several months ago? It is $579.7 billion. In that document, for the year 2000-01 what are they projecting for the debt? It is $579.7 billion.
What is the change in the debt? Zero. Because the government has no plans to pay off the debt. Instead it is saying it has a contingency fund and if it does not need it, of course it will be used to reduce the debt. Meanwhile the government is using all sorts of chicanery in its budgeting process, in its documentation and in its communications and says “We are going to take this money and put it into a fund. We will be able to use it so that Canadians will think we are doing something”.
In this budget which we are talking about today, and the debate on which has now been shut down, there is a motion about the millennium fund. The parliamentary secretary, for whom I have a lot of personal respect, read a departmental speech and referred to the millennium scholarship fund. That is atrocious. It is against accounting rules. It is against everything that makes any sense.
The government in the 1998-99 budget is costing out money that will not be available until the year 2000 so we can celebrate the year 2000. It is taking money year by year, budget by budget, and socking it away for the big Liberal re-election fund which coincidentally will happen within a year of the millennium celebration. That is atrocious. The way the government is trying to spin it is absolutely shameful.
I have a son who is a student and is really having trouble making ends meet. He has to look after his family while he goes to classes. He is trying to earn money so that he can pay his tuition and provide food and housing for his family. He has to make enough money so that he gets close to having to pay taxes. If he actually earned enough so that he could get by without having to borrow, he would have to pay taxes. As it is now, all the Liberal government does is force him into debt while it is saving up for its election fund with this big high power millennium scholarship fund for students in the future. The government is ignoring those who have a genuine need today. The 1998-99 budget ought to deal with the issues of 1998-99 first and foremost.
I am not against the government saying it projects in subsequent budgets that this will be done and there is room for long term planning, but to actually budget it out is contrary to the rules of accounting. It is contrary to what the auditor general says is acceptable and those guys are doing it anyway. They are running roughshod over the rights of Canadian taxpayers.
I think of the ways the government mismanages and misspends money. My hon. colleague from the NDP brought some of these to our attention already. It keeps spending money and wasting money on things no Canadians would support if they were actually given an opportunity to vote on them. Instead the government is just wasting our money.
The hon. member mentioned the dumb blond joke book for $98,000. There are people in my riding who make $15,000 a year and pay taxes. If I asked them if they were happy about the fact that the taxes they are paying are going to supplement the publishing of such a book, they would really get upset and I would not blame them.
There are other things which are just ridiculous. There is one in Hamilton which is using $60,000 of taxpayers' money, which I suppose is the money that 60 middle income taxpayers have to earn in a month. Sixty taxpayers will be sponsoring a trail in Hamilton so that visitors can stroll along and discover old factory buildings. That is totally absurd.
We need to leave the money in the hands of the people who earn it. Sure we can justify taking money out in the form of taxation for reasonable expenditures, but this type of thing has to stop. I am committed to making it stop.
We are contributing $50,000 to a scavenger hunt in Parry Sound. When I was a youngster we had scavenger hunts and they did not cost a penny. Somebody would make up a list of things that people would go looking for. They did not need $50,000.
There is a millennium project under way recreating the Calgary town hall with the original bell for $1.1 million. Why can the locals not do that? It is because the federal government is taxing them to death. They have no choice in these matters. The whole country has to fund this. It is absolutely ridiculous.
