Erin Weir

[Income Tax Act, June 17th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, on the Liberal side of the House, I think there might have been some confusion between a middle-class tax cut and the middle tax bracket.

What the government has done is to cut the middle bracket, which actually only applies to incomes in excess of $45,000, and it goes all the way up to incomes of $90,000. Therefore, to receive the maximum benefit from this supposed middle-class tax cut, one would need to be earning an income of more than $90,000 a year, which I believe most Canadians would consider to be certainly the upper middle class. This is the reason I do not think that the title “middle-class tax cut” is very accurate.

[Income Tax Act, June 17th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, as I said in my speech, I do believe that this modest tax increase for the very wealthiest Canadians is a good and desirable policy. It will raise some needed revenue, so I certainly think it makes sense.

Where I would agree with the member for Edmonton Manning is that it will not actually raise very much revenue. In fact, it will raise significantly less money than the Liberal government is going to give away through this so-called middle-class tax cut that does not actually go to the middle class.

Therefore, if we are serious about raising revenue, we need to look at the corporate side of the ledger and start reversing corporate tax cuts, as well as closing loopholes and dealing with these offshore tax havens.

[Income Tax Act, June 17th, 2016]

They are free to applaud that, Madam Speaker.

Of, course, the flip side of that is that we do not have enough resources to fund important public services and necessary infrastructure. That is one of the main reasons we have a big federal deficit. It is important that if we want to live in a civilized society, we need to have ways of raising the revenue to pay for those services and those infrastructures that we depend on.

What has the government done in terms of generating that needed revenue?

Bill C-2 proposes an additional four percentage points of personal income tax on incomes over $200,000 per year. That is definitely a positive initiative, but it is also a fairly minor initiative. It does not actually raise very much revenue. In fact, it does not even raise enough revenue to pay for the so-called middle-class tax cut that actually goes to what we might call the upper middle class. The maximum benefit is only to people earning more than $90,000 a year. We have this kind of redistribution from the rich to the nearly rich, which is costing the treasury even more money.

We, in the NDP, have suggested that the government might look to the corporate sector as a source of additional revenues to pay for public services.

It is interesting. This morning, the Toronto Star and CBC have come out with a joint investigation that looks into the loss of revenue to offshore tax havens. It notes that all of these tax information exchange agreements that the former Conservative government was very keen to sign have actually made the problem worse.

The goal of these agreements was obviously to achieve greater transparency, to get more information about what was going on in tax havens. However, what the Conservatives did while they were in power was to put in place a policy whereby once a country had signed one of these tax information exchange agreements, there was no more enforcement. Canadian companies could just repatriate profits tax free from those jurisdictions. Far from curtailing offshore tax avoidance, this plethora of tax information exchange agreements has actually made the problem worse. I think that is a problem that we need to be addressing in this House.

I would also like to talk a bit about a specific case of offshore tax avoidance that I think really illustrates the problem.

Cameco is a company that mines uranium in Saskatchewan. In 1999, it signed a deal with its own subsidiary in Zug, Switzerland to sell that uranium to Switzerland at a fixed price of $10 per pound. Switzerland was not the ultimate destination or user of that uranium. The subsidiary in Zug was just reselling it to other jurisdictions around the world at market prices. Of course, the market price of uranium is variable, but it has consistently been quite a bit more than $10 a pound. It is currently around $30 a pound. It was up to as high as $140 a pound in 2007.

The only real effect of this arrangement was to transfer billions of dollars of profits from Canada to this Swiss tax haven. The Canada Revenue Agency has calculated that from 2003 through 2015, that cost the governments of Canada and Saskatchewan more than $2 billion in lost tax revenue.

This is a huge scandal. It first came out in 2013. At that time, I was struck by the fact that Saskatchewan's Conservative MPs and one Liberal MP were totally silent on the matter. Fortunately, we now have some New Democratic MPs from the province who are going to speak up for tax fairness and raise issues like this.

It is very concerning that we have this company that is making huge profits off of Canadian resources and then transferring those profits out of the country, in a very brazen way, in order to avoid paying tax on it.

The good news is that the Canada Revenue Agency has started to pursue this matter. That is the way in which it came out publicly in 2013. However, the news that is a little more concerning is that there has been a real tradition of both Conservative and Liberal governments not actually following through on these cases, and instead signing these deals that let the tax cheats off the hook.

Part of the reason that I want to bring the Cameco case forward in this House is to put it on record, to make sure that the Government of Canada is actually going to follow up on this and not let the company get away with this scam.

I am not alone in this. Earlier this week, an organization called Canadians for Tax Fairness presented a petition signed by more than 36,000 people, calling on Cameco to make these tax payments. There are a lot of people who are concerned about this, and finally they have some Saskatchewan voices in Parliament speaking up for them.

I would also like to touch on the provincial side of this whole question. The tax base to which provincial taxes apply is actually defined by the Government of Canada. When you have a company like Cameco shifting taxable profits out of the country, it is not just the federal government that loses out; it is also the Government of Saskatchewan that is no longer able to collect the appropriate taxes on that money.

This is a pressing concern, because the Government of Saskatchewan is running a huge deficit right now. The Government of Saskatchewan really needs that money to maintain important public programs in our province. This is a critical issue. It has just come to light recently that the small “c” conservative government in Saskatchewan refused to present a budget prior to the recent provincial election because they wanted to conceal the fact that they were running this big deficit.

Now we know there is a huge deficit there, and we know how important it would be for the Province of Saskatchewan to be able to collect fair corporate taxes from the profits generated from our province's resources. It is not just about Cameco. This point is applicable to the whole question of offshore tax avoidance.

If the federal government were to do a better job of preventing this tax avoidance and tax evasion, and actually make sure that the correct amount of profit was subject to federal corporate income tax, that would also mean those profits could be subject to provincial corporate income tax.

I think almost all provincial governments are in deficit right now, and one of the best things this Parliament could do to help our provincial governments generate the revenues they need for health care, education, and social services would be to get our tax system in order. It wants to make sure that appropriate reporting is being done, so that not only do we have adequate revenues for the federal government, but so that our provincial counterparts can fund their operations in an appropriate way as well.

We are facing a huge revenue problem in this country. We have tax rates at historic lows, which are not sufficient to fund the important services and necessary infrastructure on which Canadians rely. Why is this happening? Obviously, one of the problems is that the general corporate tax rate has been cut. As my colleague pointed out, that has led to a huge loss of revenue and has not produced investment in our economy.

The other issue is that whatever the tax rate, it is not actually being applied because of these offshore tax schemes, which were aggravated by the recent Conservative government, of which Cameco in Saskatchewan is a particularly egregious example. We need to focus on this problem and come up with concrete solutions to collect appropriate revenues.

[Income Tax Act, June 17th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, we are here today debating a tax bill. I would begin by observing that our federal government is faced with a very serious revenue problem. The Conservative members of this House like to pat themselves on the back for the fact that federal tax revenues as a share of gross domestic product are at their lowest level in about half a century.

[Income Tax Act, June 17th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola appealed for evidence-based policy and raised the concern that the rich might just leave in response to slightly higher income tax rates at the top end. Yet he presented no empirical evidence on this problem.

Luckily, a couple of weeks ago, Stanford University published a study entitled, “Millionaire Migration and the Taxation of the Elite”, which studied exactly that question south of the border. What it found was that millionaire migration is not an issue and that, in fact, the rate of interstate migration among millionaires was lower than it was among the general population.

I wonder if the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola could bring some actual evidence to bear on this question.

[The Senate, June 16th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I will take it as a compliment that the member for Winnipeg North assumes that I am a veteran MP who was here in the last Parliament. That is very kind of him.

To get into the substance of this adjournment debate, the argument that we heard from the member across the way was that it is inappropriate for members of the House of Commons to second-guess the functioning of the Senate. This is a very convenient way for the member for Winnipeg North to not actually address any of the specific arguments or analyses that I presented. It is also the ultimate circular argument on his part, because, essentially, what he is saying is we have to accept the Senate's legitimacy because the Senate is legitimate. What I am arguing is that the Senate is not legitimate and, indeed, we should do away with it.

When the member talks about accountability and transparency, that is not what I want. I think we should abolish the Senate.

[The Senate, June 16th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, every time we turn around it seems the Senate is costing Canadians another million dollars. In question period, I have asked about the Privy Council Office spending more than a million dollars a year to fund the supposedly independent advisory board for Senate appointments. I have also asked about the government leader in the Senate requesting almost a million dollars to manage these independent senators on behalf of the Liberal government.

I am very interested in hearing the government's explanation as to why it has a leader in the Senate requesting all of these managerial resources if its senators are truly independent of government direction.

The broader question that I would like to explore is whether we need to have a Senate at all. The classic argument for bicameralism is that the upper House provides a sober second thought. There are very few examples in Canadian political history of the Senate actually performing that role.

An interesting point of comparison would be at the provincial level. I do not think many Canadians are saying, “If only we had an upper house in our provincial legislature, our province would have better laws. If only our premier appointed a group of people to review the work of elected members of the legislative assembly, the governance of our province would be improved.”

That is not what we are hearing in the coffee shops in Regina, and I do not think we are hearing it anywhere else in our great country. In fact, all of the eight provinces that ever had upper houses in their legislatures have abolished those upper houses. Therefore, it seems that the consensus in favour of abolition is actually quite strong.

We sometimes hear the argument that while we do not need upper houses in our provincial legislatures, we should have one at the federal level to represent the diverse regions of our great country. In our very decentralized federation, the real source of regional representation is strong and legitimate provincial governments, not senators here in Ottawa.

It would be very interesting to put that concept to the test. The Government of Canada could initiate a Senate abolition transfer equivalent to the $90 million a year currently spent on the Senate. Those funds could be directly transferred to provincial governments in proportion to the number of Senate seats that their province currently has. For example, Prince Edward Island currently has 4 out of 105 senators. Therefore, it would be entitled to well over $3 million per year from the Senate abolition transfer.

The government and the people of Prince Edward Island have far better things they could do with more than $3 million than to support four senators here in Ottawa. However, an interesting thing would be to put that concept to the test by giving provincial governments the choice to either maintain the Senate or to abolish it and use the money for other purposes.

[Ethics, June 14th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, this format is called an adjournment debate. In a debate, there is some expectation that the members opposite will actually respond to the points being made. I laid out a number of new facts that had been revealed about the global transportation hub. I mentioned that the government's previous story had been that it was a provincial matter, that federal funds could not be spent on land purchases. I debunked those points. Instead, what we got from the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board was just reading those same claims over again.

It is almost insulting to the House for the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board to stand and tell us about a reconciliation table in the supplementary estimates (A) that has nothing to do with the global transportation hub scandal.

I raised some very important questions. The government has an opportunity to answer them, and we have not had any sort of serious response at all.

[Ethics, June 14th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, it is not every evening that we are here voting past 10 o'clock. That really puts the late into late show.

The Global Transportation Hub west of Regina is a provincial crown corporation that, after receiving $27 million in federal funding, spent a similar amount buying land from businessmen linked to the governing Saskatchewan Party for more than twice the land's publicly appraised value.

When I raised the issue in the House, the government responded in one of two ways. The President of the Treasury Board told us it is a provincial issue and the Saskatchewan government is handling it. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport assured us that federal money was only used for transportation infrastructure and could not have been used for the associated land purchases.

Since we last debated this matter, several new revelations raised more questions about both of the government's explanations. The Saskatchewan Party government claimed that the land purchases were justified by a private appraisal. On May 9, CBC reported that the Global Transportation Hub is refusing to release the private appraisal because, “Disclosure of this information could be expected to harm the reputation and cause financial loss to the preparer of the appraisal”.

In terms of the documents that the Global Transportation Hub would release, it sent CBC a fee estimate of $112,000. In addition, the provincial ministry of highways sent CBC a fee estimate of $70,000 for another 500 pages of documents, well over $100 per page. These fees are obviously far beyond what would have been needed to cover the cost of preparing the documents. The provincial government is clearly using access to information fees to prevent journalists and the public from accessing the information.

Why would the federal government trust the provincial government to get to the bottom of this matter? With the Government of Saskatchewan stonewalling, the Government of Canada must conduct its own investigation to safeguard federal tax dollars.

On April 6, the Regina Leader-Post reported that the Pinkie Road interchange, completed around the Global Transportation Hub in 2013, will have to be ripped up and rebuilt to connect to the south Regina bypass, which is quickly becoming a significant boondoggle in its own right. The Pinkie Road interchange cost $43 million and was part of the transport infrastructure for which federal funds were supposed to be used. Even if we accept that no federal funds went into land purchases, that means federal funds were spent building an interchange that is now being ripped up.

The Global Transportation Hub scandal is out of control. The people of Saskatchewan and indeed all Canadians need to know what happened to our tax dollars. The federal government must investigate. It is late, but it is not too late for the Government of Canada to start being part of the solution rather than continuing to downplay the problem.

[National Defence, June 10th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the government is flying blind when it comes to military aircraft procurement. The only way to ensure that we get the right plane at the best price is through an open competition. The Liberals promised that in the election, but now seem set to buy Super Hornets through a sole-source deal.

Yesterday at committee, senior defence officials confirmed that an open competition would be feasible and appropriate for fighter aircraft. Why has the government not started a transparent process to replace the CF-18s?