Madam Speaker, it is interesting to debate this issue today. I remind all members present, at least those who are awake and paying attention, that we are debating Bill C-72, an act to amend the Income Tax Act and to implement some of the measures announced in the budget not this year but last year. I took note of the fact that it was on February 24, 1998 that the budget speech was given which promoted and put into effect the issues we are now debating.
I need to take the first few minutes of my speech to talk about that process. I have high respect for the Government of Canada, not necessarily the government that is currently in power but for the concept of government in Canada. I have a high respect for democracy and it is appropriate for us to be aware that there is a serious flaw.
Traditionally budget measures are kept secret. There are some valid reasons for that. It is possible that if people know in advance of substantial changes in tax structures or government benefits or programs they could either buy low and sell high or make some other financial decisions that could benefit them at lot personally. It has been a tradition that budget matters have been confidential.
However, we have noticed in the last three or four years that the budget is not confidential at all. I think the Liberals are trying to deal with one of the problems arising from this fact. They are getting a smaller and smaller kick from the budget speech since most of the details are announced on Monday and the speech is given on Tuesday. They selectively and incorrectly leak information to the press.
Another thing that is rather inappropriate—and it is not that people have a chance to talk about it before the budget is announced, though that is a violation of a principle of parliament—is that we have no way of influencing the budget. There is no mechanism in Canada's parliament to actually change these things because of the way it happens.
The finance minister, probably the Prime Minister and several other bureaucrats sit in a small room somewhere and come up with these schemes. It is no secret that a lot of these schemes are based on political considerations in the hope of getting re-elected. Besides that a great deal of attention is paid to messaging and communicating.
I am in favour of good communication. Let us communicate the truth to the people. The way they communicate is very important because they want people to believe certain things about what they are doing to maximize their chances of re-election. If I can put it bluntly, they just want to look good. I suppose there is nothing wrong with that. My colleague from Crowfoot and I like to look good. There is nothing wrong with wanting to look good but we need to be realistic.
Some 387 days after that budget was presented by the finance minister we are now debating it. It is a farce because at the end of this debate there will be a vote and there is no way we will be able to reverse what the finance minister announced on February 24, 1998. We know that, because government members are forced to vote for these measures. It has to do with the ridiculous notion that if we ever vote against a government money measure it somehow shows lack of confidence in the government and we therefore need to have an election.
While members stand to vote, presumably on Bill C-72, they will actually be standing to declare their desire not to have an election. That is totally absurd. One should not have to answer one question when the result applies to something totally different.
We in the House need the ability as individual members of parliament to speak and to vote against measures that are to the detriment of Canadian taxpayers. We need a way of amending and actually altering legislation in a meaningful way so that the Canadian citizen, the Canadian taxpayer, is represented in a tangible way that protects his or her interests.
The NDP member from Kamloops actually stole part of my speech. In preparation for speaking today I obtained a copy of Bill C-72. I know, probably more than anyone in the House, that I cannot use props. This is not a prop. It is just a copy of a 157 page bill.
As an opposition member of parliament whose job it is to find ways in which legislation can be improved and to give alternatives to the Canadian people, I find it distressing that the things announced by the Minister of Finance over a year ago could be brought before the House in a bill that was tabled on March 16, 1999. Today is March 18. The bill was first introduced a scant two days ago. As I have said it is 157 pages long in both official languages. We could cut it in half in terms of functional reading in either one of the languages.
The member from Kamloops read a part of the Income Tax Act and we all just about broke up. It was a comedy act. It was an endless stream of incomprehensible gibberish. I did not even look at the Income Tax Act. I looked at the bill which amends the act and other acts. The bill amends the Canada-U.S. Tax Convention Act, the Income Tax Conventions Interpretation Act, the Old Age Security Act, the War Veterans Allowances Act and certain acts related to the Income Tax Act.
I did the same as the member. I opened Bill C-72 and began to read it. I will not perform the same act he did because it would look as if I were copying him. However, when preparing for my speech I thought I should just read some of the bill so Canadians would know how convoluted it is. Let me read from page 104:
—if the completion date in respect of an eligible amount received by the individual was in the preceding tax year, the total of all amounts each of which is designated under subsection (3) by the individual for the particular year or any preceding taxation year included in the particular period, and
(b) in any other case, the amount designated under subsection (3) by the individual for the particular year.
That is only one of the sections. I suppose if we really worked we could understand it, but it is very complicated. There are also formulas that apply in the Income Tax Act. It goes on and on. It is totally convoluted.
We need a debate on the issue before us which gives us the ability to look at the bill in detail and to propose amendments. We need a mechanism in parliament whereby we could say that an amendment was necessary. If we are able by debate to persuade the majority of members in the House, regardless of what their whips tell them, that collectively in our wisdom something should be changed, then it should be changed. It should not involve a vote of confidence in the government. It should not involve the question of having another election. It should be that we are making a law for the people and should do it better. There is no mechanism to improve anything.
We are debating a bill over a year after the budget was presented. In the end we will go through a robot-like vote and it will be passed. It will go to the Senate and will be passed. Everything is done in lock-step. It is just absolutely ridiculous.
I have a quote which I have used in the House before. It will read it again because it is appropriate. There are endless convoluted rules. We need tax lawyers to compute one page of it. I suppose one could say it is a classic. It is by Alexis de Tocqueville, a very famous historian and politician who visited America and wrote a four volume book called Democracy in America . He observed how democracy works. I am a defender of democracy, but I am also not so naive as to think we have reached the apex of what it can be. There are a lot of areas to improve. It reads:
—after having thus successfully taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot perpetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.
I believe that is what is happening here. I am amazed at the amendments in the bill with respect to deducting RRSP money from tax when used to educate children. On the surface it looks like a wonderful idea because one can avoid paying taxes on some income. I ask a fundamental question. What business is it of any government to so minutely control all my financial decisions by having such a high tax rate that the most important decision I can make is how to avoid paying taxes?
The government, through pages and pages and pages of Income Tax Act and amendments thereto, controls every minutia of my life and the life of taxpayers out there. They have to decide to do one thing instead of another. If they do not they cannot survive because the government confiscates the money. That is a wrong basis on which to govern.
It is time that we got some economic freedom. We always talk about freedom. We are economic slaves to the government. Half or more of our income is confiscated by the different levels of government which totally takes our freedom away from us.
It is to the point where families have to make decisions against their initial will that both parents will enter the workplace to provide for their own needs of life and for their family. People are crunched into the corner. Who looks after the children while both parents are working? The government imposes so many high taxes on them that it is a necessity to go to work. Meanwhile they are taxed to death. Half of what they earn goes to taxes.
I mentioned the example before. We have municipal taxes. We have provincial taxes. We have income taxes. We have excise taxes. We have import taxes. We have sin taxes. GST, HST. It goes on and on and on. Every penny of GST we pay we have already paid income tax on and the government takes more of the money that has already been taxed and taxes it some more.
The same thing is true for my property tax. In Canada, I cannot reduce my taxable income by the amount I use to pay my property tax. I can if I am in business. Then there is a different rule, another minute rule that controls our lives.
I am a husband with my wife trying to provide a place for my family and I have to pay taxes to provide the basic services in my community. I would venture to say I get a much more substantial tax kick out of my municipal taxes than I do out of my federal taxes in the amount paid and in what I personally receive in benefits for myself and my family in terms of services.
Every time I pay those taxes, say they are $2,400 a year, I have to earn $4,000. I earn $4,000. The federal and provincial governments take 40% of it. I am left with $2,400. I write a cheque to the county where I reside and my $4,000 of earnings is gone. Bingo, just like that. Zip. There is not a thing I can do about it.
Meanwhile, we have all the minute details in this budget that say “We want you to do this and we want you to do that”. The tax code is arranged so that the government controls to the smallest detail how a person spends the money they earn. I do not believe it is entitled to do that to the degree it is done in this country. It has gone completely overboard, totally.
I do not know if we will ever be able to achieve the system we had when I was a student. This bill has some new rules on interest payments on student loans. The Liberals in this government and the Conservatives before them, have arranged for the financing of students by putting a burden of debt on their backs that crushes them.
They not only have their share of the federal debt and the respective provincial debts which is $20,000 or $25,000 per person. Students, our pages here, each one of them without having lifted a finger already probably owes $20,000 of federal debt and at least another $10,000 of provincial debt. There they are with a $30,000 debt on their backs and they have not graduated from school yet.
What does this government and the government before it do? They arrange for these students to be able to get student loans while the costs of education are rising exponentially. As a result, we are told that many students now have student loans of $50,000 or $60,000 when they graduate.
It sounds so wonderful. Bill C-72 says “We are going to make it nicer for these students. We are going to allow them maybe even to get forgiveness for part of their loan. We are going to allow them to reduce their taxable income by the amount of their loan”. That sounds wonderful, but it is a crock. It is a shame. It is a crime that they have that debt load in the first place. Why are citizens of this country. Why can we not provide a means of education that students can afford?
I am almost embarrassed about the fact that when I was a student I earned more money in the summer than what I needed to live all year. That included my housing, my food—I did not eat much, one can tell—my tuition, my books, everything, and I had money left over.
Students nowadays are lucky if they get a job and they are burdened with debt. That has to end. Bill C-72 is more of this nitpicking changing of little rules to control our lives. It does not address the big problem at all.
