John Duncan

[Fisheries Act, June 13th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments by the member for Winnipeg Centre, but I think he has me confused with another member. I was not a fisherman in my previous life. I think he is confusing me with the member for Delta—Richmond East.

I do come from a resource background. I was a forester. I worked in the woods and with fisheries personnel as a consequence. I lived in coastal communities and overlapped many times at the local level with the commercial and recreational fishing sectors and of course participated in all of that.

The whole question of what we know about our fisheries resource I found very interesting, because indeed, what we do not know about so many biological things is amazing. I have a somewhat biological background. My father had a biological background. One of my brothers is a carpenter, like the member, and the other one is a geneticist. The geneticist deals with biological things too. It is just amazing what we do not know.

One of the things that the biological station in Nanaimo did determine is how long some of these groundfish live. Some of the ages are absolutely incredible, well beyond what anybody comprehended. That affects the rate at which we want to harvest them, because we want to make sure we have a sustainable resource. If these mature fish are 10 years old, maybe one-tenth could be taken on an annual basis, but if they are 50 years old that is a whole different ball game. In some cases, that is what the station staff were finding out.

In terms of the member's environmental question, I think that is an important question. There are several long since abandoned mines in British Columbia. There is one in my constituency, but there are others on the coast and in the province that are continuing to create acid runoff, which is putting heavy metals and other things into the rivers. This has created a situation that has basically sterilized some river systems. The most well known example is at Britannia on the way up to Squamish and Whistler from Vancouver. One can see the bottom of that river course.

Some of them actually would not be all that expensive to fix, but the original mining ventures are long since gone. The federal government is saying that they are not its responsibility and the province is saying the same and nothing happens. I think we need to change that approach. Surely to God if something is killing the fisheries resource there should be some joint federal-provincial way to deal with those sites, especially when we can prove there is a cost effective way to do it.

[Fisheries Act, June 13th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the subamendment to Bill C-52. I have enjoyed the debate in a way that I have not enjoyed some other debates recently. Whenever we start talking about fish, people's emotions very often come into it. Even though we have had some people with a background in the legal fraternity who have become quite involved in the debate tonight, I find it very satisfying to be sitting between two people with a legal background and two away from our fisheries critic from Newfoundland and Labrador. Being from British Columbia, I have a riding with a very strong fisheries component and influence.

This has been a great debate. We have learned quite a bit. One thing we have learned is that the government in this legislation specifically is trying to put a very bad patch on a flat tire. If it succeeds in what it is attempting to do, it only will have a blow out again. This is not the way to create a regime where we ask people to enforce a licence, to fine people or put them in jail on the basis of no statutory authority and we do it by declaring that the words in the bill do not constitute part of the Statutory Instruments Act.

This is the worst kind of an ad hoc emergency, short term, evasive, unprincipled way to approach this issue. Unfortunately, this has become a philosophical way of life for some of the senior management at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It exhibits itself in the way they manage the department.

If we go to the crux of the issue, it is all about enforcement of the fishery. How do we enforce the fishery? Presumably we do it through the act and then we do it through regulation. Administratively, we do it through the licence process.

We know the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has been remiss in its enforcement of areas where it has a very clear responsibility and authority. I will only talk about British Columbia because that is what I know the best for the purposes of example.

We had a Fraser River sockeye fishery that was being prosecuted by people, with no enforcement being carried on portions of the river. That was a deliberate decision by some people in the bureaucracy. There was no political will to give it what they really needed, which was police backup because of the fact that it felt threatened. This is all a matter of public record. We know that enforcement did not occur. This contributed in a major way to the collapse of that fishery.

While that very lack of enforcement was happening, we had enforcement officers in Johnson Strait boarding boats and fining them because they did not have the log filled out for that day. This is the kind of lack of appropriate priority setting that we see over and over from the department. This comes from a department which controls virtually every aspect of the livelihood of the commercial sector of the fishery.

That direct control requires parliamentary scrutiny and parliamentary approval if we are going to avoid the pitfalls of having the bureaucracy or junior officials carry out vendettas. It would put recipients of licences at the mercy of some entity that is not palatable. This already happens to some extent and is very problematical. There are no end of things that could be scrutinized in the system.

Recently, a fisherman who had been part of developing a new fishery, what is called an emerging fishery. Because he had been partaking in the experimental end of it, everything on the form that he filled out to indicate that he was eligible for a licence in this new regime of licensing, everything pointed to him being eligible. An employee of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans accepted the fee and it was only several weeks later that the applicant learned that there had been a judgment that the boat did not have a certain kind of licence in a certain timeframe and therefore did not qualify. That was based on the way the form was filled out and not the actuality. The judgment was that the form was controlling everything despite the fact that when the form was accepted, it all looked okay.

Here is an individual who is now not licensed in a fishery he helped develop through no fault of his own. One would assume that there would be a fairness test and an appeal, and that this would be a very easy thing to overcome. It just so happens that an emerging fishery is not eligible for appeal to a tribunal. The rules are not clear that there is any appeal and so presumably it could be ruled either way that there is an appeal or there is not an appeal.

I have certainly made my representations and to date it has been quite a few weeks without a response. In the meantime, time marches on and fishing seasons come and go, so this is probably becoming an academic question. These questions are not academic when somebody's livelihood is at stake. Over and over again, every aspect of fisheries policies, fisheries regulations, and fisheries licensing has everything to do with whether a person is able to make a living or not in the commercial sector.

We must ensure that what we are doing is appropriate and in the long term interests of the fishery, not just to ensure that our commercial harvesters are treated appropriately but to ensure that conservation and every other aspect of the fishery is being considered under a system that is open to scrutiny and has parliamentary oversight when appropriate.

We have had a real problem with the priorities of the fisheries department. We have witnessed the collapse of the Fraser River fishery and this was not the first time for the sockeye runs. We have seen places like Smith Inlet where we have had runs decimated. There is no longer any real attempt to even monitor what is truly going up the rivers and what is happening there. It was a major salmon resource in the mid-coast of British Columbia that for a generation or more has now been largely left to its own devices and abandoned, and it is not doing well at all.

We have seen extinctions of runs with no explanation. We have seen a lack of commitment from this administration on what really gets many people involved in the fishery which is salmon enhancement and our whole approach to habitat improvement and our hatchery system.

We have had over a $4 million cut to that program in British Columbia and Yukon. This is a program that enlists thousands of volunteers. I am not sure what the latest number is but I read that it is in the tens of thousands of people who volunteer their time on the west coast of Canada to do work in this area. A small program that has not risen in cost to the government is now being cut back because of so-called overspending some years ago, making many people very unhappy. There has never been a satisfactory explanation.

We know that the fisheries department is now divided between those who support these expenditures and those who are trying to grab part of that budget for their own because they are so stretched for funds. The sharp pencils in Ottawa are quite happy to let that game play itself out because in the meantime they are controlling the agenda. We have a situation where the public expectation of what the department should be doing and could be doing is quite different from the reality.

What happened in this latest round on the Fraser River is a perfect example. The fisheries office in the Fraser Valley was responsible for much of the enforcement in that area, but it was not happening. The people in the Fraser Valley were not hoodwinked in any way. They knew that the department lost its will, its ability or desire to enforce the rules on the Fraser River, and so they were not under any misunderstanding at all. That is consistent with the sort of elusive and ad hoc, unprincipled approach that the department was taking as to how it conducted business.

I started off by talking about the importance of this whole enforcement regime. The government can change the words. It is only trying to put a patch on a flat tire, but it is also trying to find a way to make its enforcement band-aid even easier from an academic, theoretical standpoint. It all means nothing if one is not prepared to do any of the enforcement.

We had cuts to the number of enforcement people on the west coast and we had a huge move to put enforcement people in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. That was several years ago. We are now at the point where that experiment turned out to be a bad idea. They really frustrated landowners in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba with this overzealous behaviour that rocked generations-old practices, carried out a whole bunch of counterproductive things, and attacked the basic premise that people who own private property had some say over how they were going to cultivate their land and so on.

Now we have the government retrenching those very people who they shipped out, but it is not translating itself into an improvement on enforcement efforts on the coast. We are still not getting the resources. This essentially means that once again what many view as a priority activity of government becomes an activity of government that government sees as non-essential and one that it can easily and largely dispose of, so this is not a happy time.

We have first level fisheries personnel who deeply care about the resource. They involve themselves in the community. They involve themselves with the people who are users of the resource. They provide an interface with the public and they are not governed by a clock. They deeply care about the resource.

We have members of the public in the very same category. I talked about the thousands of people who volunteer. We have school children with a deep appreciation of the wonders of the fisheries resource. They take school days, and go out and see what is going on. We have rural communities with a deep attachment and sometimes this is very much an economic question as well.

We have some of our coastal communities that have become quite dependent on the commercial recreational sector that occurs in the summer time. Those communities are feeling quite vulnerable to the actions of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as well because if they choose to suddenly cut the activities of the local hatchery, this can have a devastating effect.

We have deep concerns being expressed by all of the communities on northern Vancouver Island within my riding regarding the behaviour of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

This has also been expressed through the aboriginal fishing groups in my riding, sometimes as an association. Sometimes on a personal level I have been approached. It is easier for them to talk to me; I can be the bearer rather than them.

What we have with this bill is a political and bureaucratic situation that is a failure of the public interest. I welcome any questions.

[Canada Border Services Agency Act, June 13th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, the member for Windsor West and I sit on the same committee. We have heard the same witnesses. We have had discussions about the inappropriateness of the grandfathering on customs charges that occurs in some specific examples.

Yes, there is the example about which the member from Windsor talked. In my constituency, the community of Comox built a brand new air terminal. WestJet uses it. Last year there were 180,000 passengers. There are international flights to Mexico. Because it did not have any international flights prior to the grandfathering date, the community is responsible for $250,000 worth of customs charges. This is not discretionary in any way.

What happens is communities that are trying to better themselves are being penalized by this system. It is extraordinary how dampening this is. This charge killed flights between Seattle and Kamloops. This very issue apparently killed the ferry run between Toronto and Rochester. The economics were all there except for the grandfathering charge.

We say this is a security charge, a security fee. It is a federal responsibility. It should not be offloaded in a discriminatory way to business or communities in this fashion.

[Canada Border Services Agency Act, June 13th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Calgary Centre.

The Canadian border services agency was created by an order in council, so what we are seeing in the bill has actually been created by an order in council and not a lot will change from the current circumstances.

We know there is a difference between the way the U.S. and Canada are approaching their border crossings to a significant degree. The U.S., since 9/11, is primarily security focused and the Canadian government still tends to look at our border facilities as though they are primarily related to trade.

If we were to keep our border crossings, ports and airports, where all of this comes into play to facilitate the movement of people and goods, then we would have to operate in a way that would also meet security needs. One is unavoidably attached to the other in the current world.

We have before us now a situation where the Canadian government is not holding up its end on several fronts when it comes to ensuring that the Canadian border will remain a viable conduit for people and goods.

We have seen some improvements. We had a very interesting witness at the industry committee last week, Mr. Garry Douglas from the New York-Quebec corridor. The main land bridge between Quebec and New York State, which is the main land entry point for all trade emanating from Quebec to the U.S., is being worked on. That is the fourth largest crossing in terms of value of goods. If one were to have a zero based look at the facilities at that crossing, one would rapidly come to the conclusion that the facilities are completely inadequate on both sides of the border.

Certainly, the U.S. side recognized that problem in 1999. The Americans started off with a $15 million budget and moved to a $30 million and are now at $107 million. They will basically erase all of the border facilities there and start over again. They will have state of the art technology. They will have all the disciplines there which means one stop shopping for trade and people. They will triple their staff and have new infrastructure. This is a new, state of the art facility.

What is the Canadian government doing? The answer is, nothing. The federal contribution is some money toward improving the highway, which is badly in need of improvements, but nothing in terms of the infrastructure at the border. As a matter of fact, in order to facilitate the U.S. changes, there is actually one building that must be moved, but there is no commitment at this point from the Canadian government to move that building.

I could not believe what I had heard at committee, so I thought I would have a look at it. I made the crossing this past weekend in order to see for myself what is going on.

This area is rural. There is lots of room to create whatever kind of facility we want there. We are not constrained by topography or anything else. It is an ideal crossing. There are no bridges or impediments to creating an ideal crossing. The lack of commitment from the Canadian government is an increasing puzzle.

The shared concern of the Quebec and New York people who are part of this private-public partnership to create an economic engine through a proper border facility there is that if Canada does not participate in this exercise, then all that investment and infrastructure on the U.S. side will be turned into a security-focused facility. Rather than being a conduit and a passageway, it has the probability or the possibility of becoming a wall.

As much as we may agree with the bill and the direction of it and see it as a step forward, if the government does not move in its actions, not its words, in a way that contributes to what is in the national interests, then we have a major problem.

The truth of the matter is all of the trucks going south through this facility are loaded and many of the trucks going north are empty. We have an easier time clearing traffic than the U.S., but we have to keep up with the technology to ensure we operate at the same level and standard of behaviour as our U.S. partners at these border facilities. Otherwise we are creating a real problem.

We are the ones at risk because 82% of our trade needs to cross that border and does. Here is an example of something that needs to be improved.

I came back on the weekend at 5:30 in the afternoon. Three of the seven gates were open. There is not just a facility problem, there is a personnel problem. The public was asked to wait in the heat of the day for an inordinate amount of time, simply because we did not have more gates open. Apparently this is not unusual. This is the standard of behaviour we exhibit at that border on any given day when the demand is there to justify more people.

No one can quite understand why we operate in such an irrational fashion. I am pleading for some common sense to be brought into the whole area of border security. It is something that is definitely in the national interest. It does not just apply to this one border crossing. We have examples across the country of where this is applicable. However, we have a very clear example of where the U.S. is committing major moneys and we are doing nothing.

I appeal to the government to do a zero based look at what we need across the country. What could we build if there were no facilities and find out what standard we need to reach. That should be our national strategy.

[Supply, June 9th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, we need major reform of the EI system. We have some examples of people who are not currently covered. People who get sick receive shorter EI benefits than if they were still working and then they have no choice but to go on welfare and eat up their assets. That is wrong. Once we make those reforms, we should put EI on a sustainable basis, not one where it builds huge surpluses that then go into government general revenues that get spent inappropriately.

[Supply, June 9th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I agree with the direction of the question. I support this motion because it is talking about establishing a strategy to help older workers who lose their jobs.

In terms of the preamble regarding globalization, that to me is neither here nor there in a sense because the root cause of job loss can be many things. Even in the three examples I gave, the closure of the mine had to do with exhausting the resource. The fisheries downsizing had to do with technology and the fact that a single boat can catch more fish than it ever could. In the softwood area, a lot of that has to do with a trade dispute. Therefore in actual fact, in those three examples there is nothing that comes to mind that would have anything to do with globalization.

I agree with the fact that the motion is a little weak in regard to the wording, but the intent is clear. We are dealing with a strategy to help older workers who lose their jobs and I am happy to support that intent.

[Supply, June 9th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I am quite happy to be speaking to this Bloc motion today. This whole area of retraining of older workers is an area with which my part of the country has had quite a bit of experience. On some occasions people have been placed on the unemployment ranks as a direct result of federal actions and sometimes as a direct result of federal inaction, and sometimes for other reasons.

I can give some good examples of that. Certainly, in the fishing section my riding was hit harder than any other riding on the west coast. This occurred when we had the so-called Mifflin plan, which downsized the fishing sector. It was a federal buyout of commercial fishing licences. It reduced the number of licensed boats and licensed fishermen in many communities by huge numbers, sometimes up to 90%.

This displacement of workers was addressed with a federal program which was administered by a group set up locally to administer and run programs. This ran for several years. I think the Mifflin plan was introduced in the mid-nineties. This plan ran for three or four years. It tried to give people skills that they did not currently have to make them available for alternate work. It had a very high placement rate.

The reason why it did was because it was run locally and run in a way that was very practical, hands on and bottom line oriented. It was not run by a distant bureaucracy. It was not hamstrung in its ability to be creative in how it operated. It did a lot of things in conjunction with the local community and/or local businesses.

That is an example or a model of how things can operate in this kind of environment. We brought those people who were running that program in the north island to Ottawa. They appeared before the fisheries committee at that time. We had some very good feedback. On balance that was a very good program. The program was terminated a little prematurely. During its lifetime it created some very good results for people.

I have another example of retraining or measures for older workers which was quite different. We had a large copper mine on the north island that closed in the early nineties after about 35 years of operation. The community of Port Hardy was very dependent upon that mine for employment and tax revenue.

The miners from that operation, who were in the older age category, became eligible for the tail end of a program that was run by HRDC in those days, whereby they could bridge to retirement. It was not a retraining program and not at all in tune with this. This was another example of what kind of measures can be looked at in terms of older workers.

Certainly, to get into an extended training program, the intent of individuals is to stay where they are which is not where employment possibilities may be. Since they are not that far away from the ability to retire, just bridging for retirement makes a lot of sense at times. In the case of this mine, some miners took advantage of that. That meant that they ended up staying in the community, retaining the assets of their home, continued to contribute to the economy with their retirement fixed income, and many of them are still there today. It would have been a great loss to the community if they had moved away.

My riding contains the wood basket for the coast. The largest part of the annual cut for the forest industry in coastal British Columbia would come from the northern part of Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland. That has meant, as a consequence of the softwood dispute, that there has been a huge displacement and restructuring in that workforce.

It occurs to me that other than a community-based softwood adjustment package announced by the government, there has been very little done for the industry or the workers and their families in this area. One Friday afternoon announcement in Ottawa of a guarantee for a client customer of Bombardier exceeds in total the aid that has been coming forward from the federal government to the entire Canadian softwood industry, the workers, families and communities, despite the fact that the softwood dispute is our number one trade dispute.

It is the world's number one trade dispute. It has gone on for years. It now consists of trade harassment and at this point it appears that the government federal strategy is to starve our own industry into submission, so that it will be willing to surrender to some kind of a deal which is not in our national interest.

This lack of commitment to older workers, particularly in the softwood area, is a concern. We have a private member's Bill C-364 sponsored by the member for Fort McMurray—Athabasca. It talks about support for industry in disputes such as the softwood dispute in an important way. One of the clauses talk about compensation:

--on more than one occasion within any period of six years or continuously during any period of more than two years, been the subject of an unjustified restrictive trade action or actions in respect of the export of Canadian goods to a foreign state by the government of that state, the Minister shall pay all reasonable legal expenses incurred by the exporter or the association in any litigation actions enforcing the terms of a trade agreement.

Right now the Canadian forest industry is being asked to pick up the tab on most of the legal costs for what amounts to pursuing legal and trade actions that are in the national interest.

I see that I am not going to be able to complete my presentation because my time is up.

[Excise Tax Act, June 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of speculation on that very front. We know the tax was imposed in 1918. We know that the Canadian Jewellers Association never existed prior to the imposition of the tax and that this became the motivator for jewellers to form themselves. Their mandate was to get rid of this tax which they saw as being unfair for at least the last 50 years.

Why has this tax been the last one to be removed or contemplated to be removed? It has been suggested that because the constituency is fairly small they did not have a lot of political clout.

It also has been suggested that by promising the jewellers that it would be eliminated but then not doing so, it would keep them on the hook as a potential political funding source, for lack of a better word.

If we were to resolve the problem then the jewellers would go back and be happy with doing business. We do not need political friends in the same way as we do when we are trying to get rid of a very discriminatory tax.

Every time I think I understand this whole file and this tax and deal with a few more people, I find out a few more things. That has sort of bubbled up to the surface as maybe being the rationale why this tax has hung in there for such a long time.

[Excise Tax Act, June 7th, 2005]

moved that the bill be read the third time and passed.

Madam Speaker, it has taken a long time for the bill to get to this stage, but I want to thank members of this place for collapsing report stage and moving it on to third reading.

The bill was first introduced last year on November 3 and debated for the first time on November 26. The bill was then scheduled for a second hour of debate just before Christmas, but because the Christmas break was early, it was not until January that the bill was sent to the finance committee.

It might be worth noting that what we are dealing with here is section 5 of the Excise Tax Act, which under the current regulations is a three part clause giving effect to impose a hidden 10% tax on watches and clocks, on semi-precious metals and stones and on jewellery.

This has been a very controversial tax, which has been around as one of a suite of luxury taxes since 1918. It was a consequence of World War I, known as the great war at that time. This very tax was the impetus for the creation of the Canadian Jewellers Association which has been fighting this tax for decades. In fact, I talked to one jeweller who had his first meeting with the federal finance minister on this tax in 1947. This is a very heartfelt measure to finally try to end the last vestige of these so-called luxury taxes dating back to 1918.

Consequent to the fact that the bill was sent to the finance committee in January, the federal budget was announced. Support by members of all parties for Bill C-259 was quite strong.

The government put a provision in the budget in February that this tax would be phased out over four years at 2% per year. This in a sense was welcomed, but in another sense there was further division because a bad tax was a bad idea so why not get rid of it in its entirety. Therefore, my sponsored bill continued in the process.

We are here today, still with industry solidarity and just a few months after the budget document, with a real chance to terminate this terrible tax.

Because the committee had already studied the issue several times, I was hopeful the bill would proceed rather quickly to a vote. Unfortunately, it took nearly the maximum allowable time period before the bill was approved. There were several unexplained cancellations and delays before I was able to appear before committee and during that time the February budget was announced.

I believe it was the strong support for Bill C-259 here in Parliament and among the public that prompted the government to include a provision in the budget to phase out the tax over four years. While I was pleased by that, my opinion then and my opinion today is that a counterproductive tax is a counterproductive tax, and so I have continued with the bill.

When I finally appeared before the committee on March 24, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Finance Minister suggested that the jewellery industry did not support my bill and he moved to dismiss it. There have been continuous attempts to undermine the bill at every stage since.

I am pleased to say that the parliamentary secretary was unsuccessful in doing so. I am also pleased to report that the industry is solidly behind the bill as it was ruled in order today by the Speaker in a very straightforward ruling consistent with all of the legal or legislative advice that I have received on the bill since it started its torturous travel through the committee process.

I was not pleased that the bill continued to be delayed. Despite only one outstanding request to appear before the committee, which was quickly withdrawn in an attempt to see the bill move through the committee without delay, the chair initiated a study which further delayed passage of the bill.

In May the Canadian Jewellers Association and the Quebec Jewellers' Corporation appeared as witnesses and strongly supported the bill and the immediate repeal of the excise tax on jewellery if they could be assured that watches and jewellery were both subject to the provisions of the bill.

Mr. André Marchand, president of the Quebec Jewellers' Corporation, testified at the committee that action was needed immediately rather than four years from now. He said:

If no positive action is taken, this may lead to the industry's imminent demise. The situation is critical and we, as retailers, manufacturers, importers and wholesalers are urging you to address this problem in order to once and for all put an end to this flagrant injustice which has gone on too long.

An immediate and complete scrapping of this provision [meaning the taxation] is therefore fully warranted. We would ask you to review your position, thereby enabling our industry to take back its rightful place despite increasingly tough competition.

The Canadian Jewellery Association also called for the immediate elimination of the tax. The president of the CJA, Carmen Rivet, said:

We have always asked for its immediate and total elimination. This is what we fought for and that is what we have always hoped for.

The testimony of the jewellery industry representatives prompted the committee to pass an amendment to the bill. Bill C-259 was amended to include watches, which I am told made up a significant part of a jeweller's business. I think this greatly strengthened the bill. There was some argument whether the amendment was within the scope of the bill but it was ruled, both at committee and again earlier today by the Speaker, that it certainly was in order.

The bill was passed as amended at the committee on May 19 bringing the bill where it is today before the House.

I believe the time has come to scrap this tax and I urge members of the House to pass Bill C-259.

At this time I would like to share with the House some of the numerous letters I have received in support of the bill and I will read some of the ones I received following the introduction of the federal budget as well.

This is from a jewellery retailer employee who said:

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to eliminate the Excise Tax all at once (instead of phasing it out). The administrative and logistics costs are enormous, and the thought of having to deal with the paperwork and meetings over and over for the next four to five years makes my head hurt.

Please do what you can to let your peers know how much time, effort, and money would be saved by taking care of this once and for all!

I have a letter from the Quebec Jewellers' Corporation dated April 6 of this year. It goes on to explain that:

A clause in this law exempted artisans from the excise tax if they manufactured a maximum of $50,000 per year.

It then became easy and practical to shut down a company as soon as this amount was reached and open new ones as often as needed.

This is another way a bad tax has contributed to tax avoidance behaviour that has been very destructive and undermining of the industry.

Speaking on behalf of the corporation, the president went to say:

Reluctantly, we accepted to spread out the removal of this tax over a period of four years while being convinced that it would have been better to fully abolish this tax as soon as the budget was presented.

We would like to understand why the jewellery industry was dealt with in this fashion, when all other “luxury” industries that were subjected to this same tax benefited from the total repeal of the tax as soon as it was accepted.

In the name of all retail jewellers, manufacturers, importers and wholesalers that we represent, we enjoin you to correct the current situation and terminate once and for all this blatant injustice that has already lasted too long.

For those reasons, we fully support Bill C-259 and the immediate elimination of the excise tax on jewellery.

An immediate, total and complete repeal is fully justified and will allow our industry to reclaim its place despite an increasingly more constraining competition.

This will open the door to healthy competition and place us in a position to respond to a tax originating from emerging countries and the local industry.

I have another letter from Idar Bergseth Designs Inc. which reads:

It is very important for us, not due as much to the cost of the tax, as it is the punitive nature of administering it as craftspeople. It takes us several hours a month just to calculate the tax properly, tracking every piece of inventory, every stone, every finding, and knowing at what stage excise was paid on it.... It's an administrative nightmare.

One other thing that should be pointed out is that much of the slave made jewellery from Asia comes into the country with invoices that are not completely in agreement with the actual cost to the importer. As the goods are taxed at 10% of the value as stated on the invoice, this puts the honest Canadian manufacturers and craftspeople at a further disadvantage.

I have another letter from Pearls Katsuyama, a division of Paramount Trading Co. It states:

As a current member of the Canadian Jewellers Association in good standing, we fully support Bill C-259, in eliminating the unfair Excise Tax immediately.

We have been in the jewellery business for forty years and have supported the efforts of the Canadian Jewellery industry to repeal the tax for many years. It should have been eliminated when the GST legislation was put into place more than ten years ago. At that time, excise tax on all other luxury goods such as fur coats and high priced pleasure boats was eliminated. Only the jewellery industry was burdened with the tax. This affected the growth of our industry and encouraged unlawful import and sale of jewellery and watches. Even a fifty dollar jewellery item or a watch was and is still subject to the excise tax. A huge majority of all the jewellery business owners and those in control, including the presidents of two of the largest retail jewellery chains in Canada are in favour of the full repeal of the excise tax immediately. Eliminating the discriminatory tax on jewellery, watches and clocks will ensure a healthy and growing jewellery industry in Canada, producing new jobs and earning more taxes for our country.

I will finish with a small paragraph from another letter writer. It states:

Thank you for your support on abolishing the truly unfair tax on our industry. You have taken a great direction in terms of reducing smuggling/black-marketing and organized crime and real tax evasion which have festered under this ridiculous cash grab. This tax has caused me grief for thirty-three years [and has] prevented me from competing with smugglers who buy sell for cash.

[Excise Tax Act, June 7th, 2005]

moved that the bill, as amended, be concurred in.

(Motion agreed to)