Jim Maloway

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question from the member. I was simply pointing out that this is certainly an issue. It was mentioned in the throne speech and my colleague, the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore, will certainly be involved in this issue and is well known in Parliament and around the country as a strong supporter of veterans issues.

My son is in the reserves in Winnipeg and may in fact be posted to Afghanistan sometime later this year. So I too am very concerned about this whole issue and think we have to come to grips with it. The days of just sweeping it under the carpet and ignoring it and hoping it will go away, I would hope are long past, even for a Conservative government.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very important point and the Americans are having that fight right now in the United States Congress. Most Canadians, Conservatives included, find there is a very big disconnect when they listen to Americans on health care, and even Conservatives find it hard to believe there could be these arguments from essentially the working class and poor in the United States that somehow we should have a private system.

As I said, I really do not understand it, but I understand that the Democrats are getting together as we speak and that Congressman Kucinich just converted yesterday to the plan, and within a few days the American Congress will probably be passing a health care bill. We can only hope that over time the system will evolve more into the system we have in Canada, France, and in England since 1949 and other parts of the world, because the Americans certainly are out of step with the rest of the developed countries as far as health care is concerned.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased today to follow the member from British Columbia, who has made a fantastic speech on the Speech from the Throne.

I certainly will get into some of the negative aspects of the throne speech and the actions of the government, but at the beginning I think I should point out that we do see some positives in what the government has presented in the throne speech. For example, we are pleased that the government promised to investigate the murders of 500 aboriginal women. We are pleased that the government is concerned about workers affected by corporate bankruptcies. We are pleased about its help for military families. We are also pleased about the government's intention to endorse the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, its support for Obama's efforts on nuclear non-proliferation and its commitment to boost support for apprenticeships and skills training.

Having said that, throne speeches are often very vague and they are promises of what we are going to do in the future. Many times I have seen in the province of Manitoba that the same material keeps appearing in throne speech after throne speech over a number of years. The government never actually gets around to doing anything about it. Therefore I hope that in this case it is going to be different and that these points that we support in the throne speech are not only announced in the throne speech but are actually acted upon and dealt with over the course of the year.

There is a large number of issues coming out of the throne speech that I want to deal with. Unfortunately there is not going to be enough time in this particular speech to deal with all of them.

However, I want to start out by talking about the whole issue of Canada-U.S. cross-border tourism. A couple of weeks ago, several members of the House were on a Canada-U.S. congressional visit. We had the member for Kings—Hants and the member for Berthier—Maskinongé along. We attended the governors conference and after that we had some visitations with congressional members.

These are ongoing visits. I was involved with them for a number of years as a provincial MLA; perhaps I went down a dozen times. It seems sometimes that we are making some progress, and the next year when we visit we find that the progress we made has been reversed.

We were meeting on a half-hour, individual basis all day long. I think we met with 40 people from Congress and quite a number of senators. One of the issues, among others, that we dealt with while we were there was that we made certain we got across to them the whole idea that cross-border tourism figures are down. They understand that too.

The issue is what we can do about it. We have lodge owners and fishing camp owners across the country who have seen the numbers and their revenues drop off a lot. We felt that government should be making it easier for people to cross the border, and one of the ways we can do that is by reducing the cost of passports.

The government should be making an extra effort on its part to do exactly that. U.S. citizens actually do not need a passport to get into Canada. They just need a passport to get back into their own country. The result is that when passport costs are so high, $80 per passport, a lot of people are unable to afford them.

We had a Congress person tell us, and the member would agree, that he multiplied the cost of the passports just for his own family. He said that is $400, and he might think twice before he makes that fishing trip to Manitoba or Ontario. This is a member of Congress. So what would the average person have to say about those sorts of costs?

Clearly we have to get greater numbers of people holding passports on both sides of the border, and perhaps a two for one, a half-priced passport for six months, should be attempted to try to solve this problem.

Instead, what we have is the government's talking about biometric passports.

The government saw this coming. It saw that the Americans were going to require passports. We were given at least a couple of years' warning on this. And the Province of Manitoba, and other provinces I believe, asked the federal government to intervene, to go to the passport office and have the passport office introduce, basically, an enhanced card so that people could go across the border for a visit to the United States. They were told they were on their own and they should develop their own card. So the Manitoba government has spent, I do not know, $13 million I think at this point developing its own card, duplicating the processes of the passport office and offering this card to people at $35 or $40. To be honest, it is not getting a big uptake at this point because people are saying that if they are going to pay $30 for a card that would just get them across the border, they may as well add another $30 or $40 to it and have a passport with which they could go across the world.

By the government's dragging its feet and not forcing the passport office to deal with the program, we now have this cottage industry across the country with all these provinces and border states developing enhanced driver's licences, in a way competing with and duplicating what the passport office is already doing. Meanwhile, time is going by and the lodge owners are suffering as a result.

It is fine that the government is announcing it is going to look at biometric passports. But when it does not even have its existing system working properly, then I think that might be a pipe dream, at least for the short term.

The Nexus program has been around a number of years. We spoke with a congress person who had not renewed his Nexus card.

There just seems to be a plethora of programs, a lack of coordination, a lack of advertising, and a lack of understanding by the public out there as to how to get these programs. If people get a Nexus card, not only do they have to go through all the security and the applications but they can only use the card at certain borders. I have been told that, for example, the Nexus lane has next to nobody in it. There is a dedicated lane at the border for people with Nexus cards. But since very few people have the card, there is hardly anybody there. It is like the Maytag repairman sitting there, waiting for the next customer to come through.

That is no way to be running a country. That is no way to be facilitating business.

We all know that the bad guys are not going to go through the border. They are going to go around the border. For several years now, at every one of the Midwest legislators' conferences, I bring up this point and I get full agreement from pretty much everybody. People from North Dakota and South Dakota and anybody who understands the issue will tell us that there is a broad uninhabited expanse along the border, and bad guys cross there. They import liquor, cigarettes, drugs, guns and so on across the border. They fly them across the border. They do not line up at the border crossing. We have constrained ourselves, tied ourselves up in shackles and knots and made it a real chore for people to get across the border, and the bad guys just go around it. So we have all the good guys lined up at the border, and the bad guys are walking around the border. It is time for us to rethink this whole border issue.

I do not think I have a lot of time to talk about these new airport scanners. The government is spending $250 million per scanner, I think it is, and the bad guys have already figured out that all they have to do is put the explosives in body cavities and they defeat the scanner. We do not have them installed yet, nor paid for, and yet they are already redundant.

I am told that my time is up, but I would be happy to take any questions that any members have on this or any other topic.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member sits on the public accounts committee as well. I want to ask him about the shifting of the tax burden from corporations to individuals. I guess if the government could offer some proof that this strategy actually works, more people may be converted to the idea.

However, the government has simply reduced its corporate tax from 40% down to 15% over the last few years, while the Americans are still at around 35%. There is no need for our country to be that much lower than the United States, especially when corporate taxes in some of the Nordic countries are at 50%.

If there were results coming out of this, the government would have an argument, but Statistics Canada and Finance Canada have said that business spending on machinery and equipment has declined as a share of GDP. Kevin Lynch, former Clerk of the Privy Council and cabinet secretary, said that IT use by Canadian business is only half of the United States.

Despite Canadian corporate taxes, the productivity growth is actually worse. Experts are exposing the government's policy as not working the way it says that it will. Why does it keep blindly following Ronald Reagan economics, or what George Bush called voodoo economics, when it has been proven not to have the desired effect?

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member to be an excellent chair of the public accounts committee. As a matter of fact, he has been the chairman now for about four years. I knew him from before I even got to this place.

I liked what he had to say about the lack of initiative on the part of the government to negotiate with the United States. We know that tourism on both sides of the border has dropped off a lot since the imposition of the new passport regulations, and here we have the government wanting to introduce a new biometric passport when it cannot even get the old passport to work properly. It should be negotiating with the American government to have a reduction in the price of the passports on both sides of the border for a six-month period or perhaps a two for one promotion, anything to get the tourism business back on track along the border.

I wonder whether the member would like to comment on that aspect of the throne speech.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the government continues to shift taxes from businesses to working people. For an example we only have to look to the harmonized sales tax in Ontario and in British Columbia, which will take effect this summer.

The government also intends to rely on personal income tax for more than four times as large a share of its revenue in the future as the contribution from corporate income tax. In other words, ordinary Canadians will pay four times more in personal income tax than businesses will pay in corporate tax.

It is important to note that wealthy Canadians receive a large portion of their income in the form of stock options, equity, dividends and profits. Corporate tax cuts actually increase their incomes. Furthermore, that income is taxed at a lower rate than the income of the average worker.

I would like to ask the member how this is fair to working people.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I want to deal with the government's shift of the taxation in this country from corporations to ordinary Canadians. When the government is finished, ordinary Canadians will be paying more than four times in taxes what corporations are paying.

We see here basically a race to the bottom. We have corporate taxes going from 40% down to 15%, when the American tax rate is still 35%. Why do we need to be so much lower than the Americans? We have Nordic countries that have corporate taxes in the 50% range and they are doing just fine.

No better sources than Statistics Canada and Finance Canada, which have said that business spending on machinery and equipment have declined as a share of GDP and that total business investment spending has declined as a percentage of corporate cash flow.

We also know that IT use by Canadian business is only half of what it is in the United States.

Where is the proof that these corporate tax reductions will work?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I want to draw the member's attention to page 8 of the throne speech, which talks about the formation of a national securities regulator. I know that certainly the province of Quebec and the province of Alberta, and certainly in the past the province of Manitoba and others, were basically opposed to this because it did in fact interfere with provincial jurisdiction.

Having said that, if this national securities regulator is to be formed and if it is run the same way that all the old securities regulators were formed, which is primarily being toothless, then how is that going to be plus?

My argument is that it is not the structure here that matters, it is who is running it, how aggressive it is, and what sort of rules it follows and regulations.

We can set up all the--

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I listened to the member's speech for 10 minutes and I did not hear any content having to deal with the throne speech itself.

The member from British Columbia asked a question and he was asking for an answer on corporate taxes and the member refused--

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, March 18th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, there are a couple of issues I have with the member's speech. He said that Canada has a strong banking system. It is largely recognized that that is the case. That is what has probably saved us from the mess that we see in the United States right now.

However, we should know here that the government had absolutely nothing to do with that. As a matter of fact, if it had had its way, it would have been deregulating the banking system in the race to the bottom following George Bush. It was the previous government and the oppositions at the time that forced the previous government to not allow a consolidation of the banks or regulations. The government is simply benefiting by something that was actually kept in place by the previous government.

Let us deal with the issue of corporate tax reductions. The Conservatives once again think that they can race to the bottom on corporate tax reductions and that we are somehow going to have a better economy because of it. The evidence is just not there. Statistics Canada said that business spending on machinery and equipment has actually declined.