Mr. Speaker, I was very interested in the comments of the hon. member for Vancouver South in response to the speech of my colleague from Edmonton Southwest. He said the Liberals feel we have to have a financial infrastructure to create a strong, vibrant and dynamic economy. That is exactly the problem with Canada at this point. The Liberals today feel the way they have felt for the last 25 years, that if the government does not do it then probably it will not happen.
The Liberals consistently are coming forward with legislation like this which will interfere even further in the affairs of ordinary Canadians in its own small insidious way.
I will speak about this issue from the point of view of what I call coffee shop common sense. There is a real vacuum of talk in the Chamber which comes from the common sense that we hear from Canadians as they gather in coffee shops, in their living rooms or around their kitchen tables at home. There is very little talk using the ordinary English or French used there. We always seem to end up hearing speeches from people using wonderful 75 cent words to describe dead end situations.
I suggest to my friend from Vancouver South that the Liberals, when using this act along with other acts to create a financial infrastructure, to create a strong, vibrant, dynamic economy, might do well to take a look at what capital is and where capital comes from.
As far as the Liberals are concerned, and many people of that thought process, the idea of taxation is to gather in the capital so it can be redistributed as the people who supposedly know best think it should be.
I believe, as do many people in my constituency, the big banks are failing small business. There may be a good intention on the part of the big banks, and certainly they do a lot of advertising and window dressing, but the biggest single problem is there is no real competition in the banking industry as it presently sits. I would be in favour of our looking at creating a situation, not as set out in Bill C-91, but a situation in legislation that would create some real competition between banks so that we could have a pool of capital.
We know the big banks are asking to get into non-traditional banking services. Of course they have gone into brokerage and now they are asking to break into insurance. They are looking at the fact that although they have countless billions of dollars flowing through their coffers on a day by day basis, nonetheless they can extract only a very small percentage of those dollars. They are therefore looking to insurance, to brokerage. I do not know what is going to come next.
The difficulty is that the banks are not in a situation where there is real competition so that they have to go out and gain the business. I say this on the basis of what I call coffee shop common sense. If I were to walk down Baker Street in my hometown of Cranbrook, or a street in Invermere, Fernie, Creston, Golden, or any of the towns in my constituency, and walk into a coffee shop and sit down with the local business people and ask what the real problem was that they were having, almost invariably they would tell me that the real problem they are having is in getting a sufficient amount of working capital. They are constantly constrained in the area of capital.
This government should really be looking at, and perhaps it can be looked at under Bill C-91 in committee, the creation of an independent investment pool of real dollars. These would not be dollars that are extracted from business by way of a tax grab, not dollars that are extracted from individuals by way of a tax grab, not money lost under regulation harassment that businesses are under these days, but real dollars that people would put into an investment pool.
Let us look at why businesses are having difficulty maintaining a capital base. They pay school tax and municipal tax. In many cases they pay water, sewer and garbage collection tax and provincial taxes. In my home province of British Columbia if a person has the audacity to have too much money, and it can be borrowed money invested in equipment in a business, that person will be taxed on the money that is invested in the items that are actually generating the profits in the first place. There is federal income tax.
There is the GST compliance costs, which of course we should talk very briefly about as a side bar issue. This government came to Parliament telling Canadians it was going to be doing away with GST and has done nothing. Anyway, there is the GST compliance costs and regulation harassment. There are good reasons for having municipal, provincial and federal regulations, but in many cases the application of those regulations for businesses becomes a harassment.
Why do many businesses have a problem keeping dollars in the business? Let us look at the list. The dollars go out to school tax, municipal tax, water, sewer, garbage, provincial tax, federal income tax, GST compliance costs and all of those things. It is no wonder that small business is having a difficult time retaining capital. There is a tax grab by all levels of government as they scrounge to find more dollars rather than doing the obvious which is to cut down on the expenditures.
This bill is going to committee. It is excellent that this bill has come to the House and under an agreement between the government and the opposition parties will be going into committee. There is the opportunity in committee for my very competent and capable Reform Party colleagues to bring some coffee shop common sense to that committee in order to move forward in an active and proactive way to make something of this bill which quite frankly I find to be a little questionable at this time. They
could bring it forward with the provision that there is no attempt on the part of the industry committee to repeat the shenanigans of the human resources and development committee. This process has the opportunity to be open, constructive and positive. I encourage all members who will be working on that committee to be sure that process is capable of happening.
I say again, the Liberals have the idea that if it is worthwhile doing then surely the government has to do it. The Reform Party believes that the government should get out of the lives, get out of the faces, get out of the pocketbooks of ordinary citizens and ordinary businesses and let them get on with doing what they do best, which is to make profits, to reinvest them and to get this country going.
