Gerry Ritz

[Agriculture, February 25th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, if the minister was to show that indignation at the cabinet table, we might actually get a program that he can deliver. The minister can repeat all the big numbers he wants, but his record on delivery five days or five years from now is despicable. It is one of failure and a litany of excuses.

The minister finally got the message that the cash deposit on CAIS had to go, but like everything else in this budget, it is a promise without a deadline. Will the minister stand up right now and give us an exact date when that ridiculous requirement will be gone?

[Agriculture, February 25th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the lack of any meaningful commitment to agriculture producers in this budget is appalling. An industry struggling to cope with a myriad of problems received .3% of the Liberals' $42 billion wish list. That is an insult.

Is this pathetic attempt a reflection of the finance minister's ignorance on the issue or the agriculture minister's incompetence?

[Child Pornography, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the St. Joseph's Catholic Women's League in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, like a majority of Canadians, is alarmed at the Liberals' half-baked measures to combat child exploitation.

CWL President Susan Seidel, Communications Convenor Debbie Wagner, and Nancy Reece circulated a petition to demand the government raise the age of consent and close the Liberal loophole of artistic merit that gives child abusers a get out of jail free card.

There are many reasons, from moral and psychological to physical, why we must establish clear laws to differentiate between normal personal relationships and the disaster of twisted adults preying on children.

Canadians have a right to their own thoughts, but society must protect our children when those thoughts lead to unacceptable actions. The Liberals cannot continue to shortchange our police forces, water down our laws, and provide loopholes to monsters and think they are done with this issue.

I join my constituents in demanding real action to protect our kids.

[National Revenue, February 10th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the revenue minister celebrates Saskatchewan by taking a $1.08 back for every dollar we gain from oil and gas revenue. Yesterday he proved to the people of Saskatchewan that his arrogance is only surpassed by his ignorance. He does not understand that his government's carrot and stick equalization formula puts Saskatchewan's future in jeopardy.

The Liberals use their outdated formula as a self-serving political program picking the winners and losers. Why will the finance minister not fix the formula so provinces like Saskatchewan do not have to fight with Ottawa to get their own money back?

[Equalization Program, February 10th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Minister of National Revenue said complaints about equalization were “mired in the world of have nots clamouring for more subsidies”. It amazes me how this minister can so easily display ignorance and arrogance at the same time.

All provinces pay into equalization so the so-called have not provinces can share the revenue of the haves. This money is not for the federal government's coffers and should never be a subsidy handed out by a bunch of Liberal hacks in Ottawa.

The Liberal formula is so screwed up that Newfoundland actually benefits more from oil and gas drilled in Saskatchewan than the citizens of my province who do the work. Provinces that see the value of their non-renewable resources go up, quickly discover the Liberals picking their pockets, undoing any hope of future prosperity.

Canadians would be better served by getting the Liberal Party and their holier-than-thou rhetoric out of this equalization debate. We must fix the formula so that all provinces benefit from their investments without going cap in hand to Ottawa every year.

What we really need to do is stop robbing Saskatchewan to pay Paul.

[Saskatchewan, February 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal Party designates ministers responsible for various regions of the country but conveniently denies it when that minister is a failure. A case in point is the finance minister masquerading as minister for Saskatchewan. The minister proclaimed Saskatchewan, with an average per capita income $5,000 below the national average, as a have province. Talk about rose coloured glasses. Waiting times for MRIs, let alone surgeries like hip replacement, are the worst in the country. Our unemployment level is low because our young people leave. Our tax burden and NDP voodoo economics scare away outside investors.

What does the outdated and complex Liberal equalization formula do? It targets our non-renewable resource base with double jeopardy. First, the feds and the NDP tax it into submission and then the formula includes penalties against what Saskatchewan should receive as a payment. The result is depressed economic activity.

With this so-called help from this finance minister, Saskatchewan will always be a have not province.

[Income Tax Act, February 3rd, 2005]

Yes, the last standing Liberal member from Saskatchewan. He still has done nothing. He will not even return calls. He is affecting the future of these kids and the future of the small town that they play hockey in.

Roy kept up that battle. He just did yeoman's work on it. She kept going on about having to be fair, having to apply the rules and it had to be Canada-wide. None of those criteria were met. It has become ludicrous and laughable that these people perpetuate this thing.

The Liberals talk about the lack of funding, that we do not have good teams going to the Olympics, that we need better teams going to the junior hockey tournaments and this type of thing. It takes money. They are going to ramp that up. They want the good news story. They get the headlines out there saying, “Look at what we are doing for our Olympic teams”. The flip side of that same coin is, look at what they have done to other teams, but only in Saskatchewan. They have to fix it. It is discrimination against Saskatchewan alone. We did not vote right, according to them, so they pick on our hockey kids. It will not fly. It did not work in the last election and it will not work in the next one.

The minister at that time, Eleanor Caplan, kept saying that these kids needed access to social programs. They did not care about the social programs. They only wanted to play hockey. The members on the Liberal side have a choice: they can lead, follow or get out of the way.

[Income Tax Act, February 3rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand today and support my colleague from Saskatchewan in this initiative.

The Liberals try to hide behind expressions like “this is not worded right” and “this could be done differently” and “how about these folks”. We agree. We are not master writers of legislation. That is what committees do. The one thing we know for sure is that the Liberal government and the bureaucrats at Revenue Canada got this wrong. We may not have it right but they got it wrong. They are continuing to reinforce that point in lawsuits and so on in trying to collect these fees from amateur sports groups.

Nothing gives one a stronger foundation in life than team sports. It has been said by every member who has spoken to this issue that team sports are a boon to Canadian society. We have let a lot of that slip. We have to reinvigorate it. Yet Revenue Canada is chasing down kids and the amateur sports teams. Amateur sports teams are the community backbone in a lot of cases and the CRA is chasing them down and fining them, and then taking them to court to try and collect.

It is only in Saskatchewan. No other province has been assessed $100,000. That is the amount I am talking about for 12 teams in Saskatchewan. I am sure the federal government has spent more money than that on lawyers in trying to collect this money.

This is not about fairness or initiative or anything. Those guys just do not get it that every once in a while they have to admit that they made a mistake and back up.

We saw that in spades with the little town of Wilkie in my riding. Revenue Canada assessed it retroactively for not charging amateur sports clubs and figure skating groups the GST on ice rent. Revenue Canada said that if Wilkie and the recreation community leased the ice to each individual hockey player, and these kids are amateurs, and each individual figure skater, there would be no GST charged. However if the ice was leased to a group, GST had to be charged. That is the opposite to buying doughnuts. We pay GST if we buy one doughnut, but we do not when we buy six. Revenue Canada got it backwards.

The crazy part of this whole thing was that the community of Wilkie paid the bill. It sent in $7,000. It did not know it could fight this charge.

I happened to be at a function in Wilkie and somebody mentioned that this had happened and thought it was ridiculous. I said, “You bet your sweet bippy it is”. I got on the phone to Revenue Canada the next day and spoke to the person in charge of this audit. I asked, “Who sent you out to do this audit? Where did this direction come from? I want to talk to that person, and when I am in government I want to fire that person”.

I was sent up the food chain and I found the person who had sent the auditor out. I asked her to send me the paragraphs in the tax code that authorized that. She said she was not sure she could get her hands on them. I told her she had better because I wanted to see them. A little over a day later I received them by fax. Right in the tax code it said there was an exemption if it was for amateur sports and figure skating. Exemption means it is not collected and it is not charged. Revenue Canada was going against what is in the code.

I phoned her back and said that the code indicated an exemption. It did not say to go for the jugular. I told her the code was being read wrong or maybe it had been translated wrong or something. We fought back and forth but lo and behold a week later the money was sent back to Wilkie with an “Oh, sorry”.

How many other communities have been nailed and do not realize that this is ridiculous? The community of Wilkie thinks I am a hero now which is great. Revenue Canada has a tainted name out there to begin with and it keeps compounding it with these stupid initiatives, going after amateur hockey players.

I have two teams in my riding and this is killing them. They raise their money with bottle drives and bake sales and whatever else the parents can put together. A lot of these kids are away from home and need to be billeted. As was said before, it costs money to feed these kids. I raised a young hockey player and he could eat his weight on a weekly basis. The $300 or whatever one gets does not even come close to that amount.

In its exuberance Revenue Canada has said that is income and somebody has to pay EI and CPP on it. What a ridiculous supposition. None of these kids can afford that type of thing. None of their parents can afford that type of thing. None of the teams can afford it. However, Revenue Canada is sending lawyers after these folks, but only in Saskatchewan.

That cost the Liberals in the last election. We are down to one Liberal minister in Saskatchewan. What has that Liberal minister, who is now the finance minister, done about this? ET call home. We have not heard from him. We have written him letters saying that he is the lead minister, that he is now the guy with the purse strings and that he should fix it. He has not even begun to address it. He is ignoring it.

The devil is in the details in situations like this. These are the types of things that rev people up. It is not the billion dollar boondoggle at HRDC or approaching $2 billion for the gun registry, which make some people mad. This makes everybody mad. They are picking on our kids. That is not even fair.

The Hon. Eleanor Caplan, who was the minister at that time, responded to Mr. Roy Bailey. I would be wrong if I did not say what a great job Roy did on this. He put his heart and soul in it. He deserves the respect of every hockey player across Canada, not just the kids in Saskatchewan. In a response to Roy, the Hon. Eleanor Caplan said, “The Revenue Agency is to administer the Income Tax Act in Canada fairly so that it applies equally to all Canadians”.

The last time I checked, all Canadians do not live in Saskatchewan. We are kind of scattered out across this hunk of ground. It did not apply to anybody else other than Saskatchewan, so there goes the fairness thing out the window. There is a fairness initiative in Revenue Canada that should apply, but it does not because those guys do not want to look at it.

Even Don Cherry became involved in this. When he heard about it, like Don does, he gave the most scathing attack on Revenue Canada. It probably has him pinned to the wall somewhere, but Don does not back down, and thank God for that. This is ridiculous.

Whether we have the wording in the bill right, who the hell cares? The whole point is that this has to see the light of day. The finance minister from Saskatchewan is running and hiding. He will not bring it forward. The government will not bring it forward. Revenue Canada will not apologize. Somebody has to push back. That is what we are doing here tonight. We are giving them a shove.

One of the Liberal members said that this was totally unfair to other Canadians. Other Canadians have not found themselves in the crosshairs of Revenue Canada. It will happen. These revenue guys are cash hungry. They have to pay for all the money that oozes out under sponsorship scandals and goes back to the Liberal Party. They have to find it somewhere, and that is what they are doing.

The Liberals wasted $150 million in the sponsorship fiasco. Here they are clawing back $100,000, chump change. It will cost them probably three or four times that to collect it. Shame on them. Stand up and vote for this bill when it comes before us. If they have any kind of backbone, that is what it will take.

There is a glaring problem. They cannot run, they cannot hide. They have to fix it. It will not take a lot to do it. Reword it, rewrite it, I do not care, but get off of these young kids. By doing nothing, they are part of the problem.

Mr. Bailey asked question after question and made statements on it. I have copies of them here. A point Roy made one day was that the Minister of Revenue kept saying that they were looking at it and that they were going to check it out. That was maybe what led to it taking almost two years to get this on the floor, other than private members' bills which are hit and miss at best. We kept thinking this was such a glaring error that nobody could walk away and not fix this, but she did.

The next person who looked after Revenue Canada did. We called them all. Nobody responded. We finally contacted the member for Wascana, the finance minister, who has the purse strings--

[Supply, February 3rd, 2005]

Madam Speaker, it is always tough to be brief when we see the crisis that agriculture is in.

The member is absolutely right. The problem is that those folks on the other side, the Liberal government, are always looking for a political answer, something from which they can make some political gain. That cannot happen in agriculture. We are producing food for the world here and quality foodstuffs for Canada.

The CAIS program itself was tainted right from day one because the minister at that time, Mr. Vanclief, used it as a hammer. He blackmailed and browbeat provinces into signing on to a program they knew was flawed. They did not want to fund it. They knew it would not work. Those comments are on the record. There were a few who caved because they needed the cash flow but it was a blackmail situation from day one. It is tainted goods.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-food did a two week whirlwind tour of Canada. He hit every airport hotel for four hours a day talking to so-called producers. Producers do not hang around in the lobbies of those airport hotels. They are out trying to get their jobs done. Those who want to talk to producers need to go to the farming communities to hold those meetings.

We did that in 1999. We put together a tremendous report on action for struggling agricultural producers, mostly grains and oilseeds at that time. The government would not even allow us to table it. We had 70 town hall meetings and spoke to over 5,000 primary producers. The government did not want to hear about it.

[Supply, February 3rd, 2005]

Madam Speaker, every time the minister gets up and talks about agriculture, he proves he was a banker.

Our program has absolutely nothing to do with supply management. We are going to backstop that industry contrary to what the minister and his cronies did over in Geneva where they put it on the chopping block. These folks need time to adjust. Those guys went over there and ponied up and changed things before anybody here had a chance to say what was needed. The minister spoke earlier about 40 representatives being along with him, but they were not allowed in the same room, so that was a bit of a false statement.

The minister also made a point about my commenting on the $110 million that went out under that CAIS advance. The point I made to the minister was that the industry lost $2 billion and more but the best the government could do was to advance $110 million. That was nowhere near the coverage that was required.

Out of the $1.8 billion that he talked about, last fall at committee his own officials alluded that only $250 million of that had been triggered at an administration cost of $154 million. The minister can check the blues on that one. That is what they said. Some $14 million of that $154 million was to administer the cash on deposit program that nobody wants. Even the bureaucrats do not want it. The safety net advisory committee said to get rid of it. The provinces said to get rid of it. They know the cash is not going to come back out of the minister's programs.

A lot of things need to be done. The problem will not get fixed by that side of the House because nobody is listening. They would far rather defend what they have proposed than step back, realize certain portions of it are not working, fix it, and move ahead. They should have done it yesterday.