Pat Martin

[Income Trusts, May 16th, 2007]

No, I am not talking strictly of him. I am talking about the income trust campaign, the income trust unit holders who are lobbying government. We all get the e-mails from them but they have no substance to their arguments. Their only argument is agreed. They want it all and they want it all now, and they do not give a damn what happens 10 years from now to the economy. It is a recipe for economic disaster. It is irresponsible. It is the role of government to step in and intervene when we are on such a disastrous course, when we are riding that bus over the cliff, as somebody said.

The NDP is committed to a dynamic economy. Witness after witness, including the Bank of Canada, supported the NDP's concerns that business income trusts were inappropriate business structures that can undermine the long term growth of a dynamic economic future for Canada.

We need to stay the course and do what is right and get back to a stable financial market and a stable investment culture and atmosphere without this unfortunate hiccup of income trusts.

[Income Trusts, May 16th, 2007]

An article of faith, a tenet for the Liberal Party of Canada.

It went from a relatively obscure tax gimmick to $200 billion in capital holdings, an untold lost revenue for Canada in terms of taxation. As that money flows through the shell to the unit holders, the unit holders get taxed as individuals with earnings, but they may be taxed at an entirely different rate. Depending on their personal tax status, they may not pay any.

In actual fact, the lost opportunity has been staggering. It is corporate greed gone wild. The lost opportunity has been devastating. It has been irresponsible. It has been nothing short of stupid to allow it to continue to this point.

We should have spoken out louder. My colleague from Timmins—James Bay and I feel a bit sheepish for not speaking out more loudly the day we learned about this atrocious system. We should have stood up to Bay Street, when the Liberals would not, and said no, that in no uncertain terms would we be the only stupid country in the world allowing this ridiculous situation.

At the shareholders meeting where they voted on whether or not they should convert, one CEO, of an oil and gas company in Alberta that converted, told the shareholders that this would not be allowed forever. He said that he could not believe they were being allowed to do it now but that seeing that it is legal, he advised the shareholders to vote yea on it and convert to an income trust because it was too good to be true. Sure enough, they went ahead and did it and they succeeded.

For many companies it started to snowball. A domino effect took place until it was out of control. Now it is not a popular move. The Liberals have ganged up with the Bloc in trying to find a way to condemn the government for doing what it had to do. I am no big fan of the Conservative Party but this is our opinion too, that the income trust debacle had to be stopped. It had to put the breaks on it and it is irresponsible now to try to reverse that.

We have been following this. The Liberals' record on income trusts has been to do what they do best, which is absolutely nothing. They stood by and watched as this debacle grew.

Independent studies show that income trusts have been over-valued by as much as 40%. Therefore, there is a whole campaign of misinformation. They will eventually drop in value. More than 20% of the business trusts that have come on stream since 2001 are down 20% in value.

What people need to know is that two out of three business trusts are paying out more in dividend earnings to their unit holders than they are bringing in. Is that not a recipe for disaster? Does that pretty much sound the death knell for that particular business because it can only do that for so many years before it will be out of business? That is simply the way this is happening.

Corporations have openly admitted that their attraction to income trusts has been tax avoidance. That is not a very noble thing to guide itself by if a business' sole purpose for restructuring its entire company is that it does not pay its fair share of taxes in this country. Even though we have stripped down the tax rate for businesses in Canada, which are lower than in the United States now, businesses are still looking for ways for wholesale tax avoidance. I call them tax fugitives. I have no respect for people or businesses that do not want to pay their fair share of taxes in this country.

The concern over the resulting loss in tax revenue has been noted by both the federal and all provincial governments irrespective of their political stripe and it is irresponsible for somebody today to be arguing that we should reverse this decision. They have not consulted anybody but the wacko little bunch of activists who have put on the most lame and ineffectual lobbying campaign I have ever seen.

[Income Trusts, May 16th, 2007]

Except for the Liberals, who lapped it up like lap dogs to corporate Canada. When this was presented to the Liberals, they allowed it to go on for years and years.

I have the figures here for what started out as simply a bad idea by some corporate zealot.

[Income Trusts, May 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, there is a good reason why the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Australia, or any country in the European Union, such as Germany or France, do not allow income trusts. The United States does not allow them because they are disastrous economic policy, and I do not use the word “disastrous” lightly.

Income trusts are corporate greed gone wild. They are a corporate wet dream. No business likes to pay taxes, so these guys have discovered a way to pay none, not just lower taxes but no taxes. The guy who developed this got a promotion. Some young Turk somewhere on Bay Street or Wall Street got a bonus that year after inventing this. I cannot get over how we have allowed this disastrous policy to percolate and incubate until it has reached the magnitude that it has.

The NDP spoke out as soon as it noticed it. I took note when the Yellow Pages converted to an income trust. It was a good number of years ago. I met one of the lawyers who orchestrated the Yellow Pages conversion. He said to me, “You are a socialist”. He asked why we were not screaming bloody murder, that somebody should call the cops, that there was robbery going on. That was essentially his point of view. He asked how we could stay silent on it, did we not read the financial pages? In actual fact, sometimes I think we do not read the financial pages enough because stuff like goes on that deserves to be denounced in the strongest possible way.

Businesses do not like paying taxes, so they argue with government all the time that they should pay less and less. We balk sometimes at that, but they have managed to shift the tax burden successfully over the years. It used to be that roughly 50% of government's tax revenue came from individuals and the other 50% came from business. That has shifted dramatically to 80:20, to 85:15, to where individuals are assuming the overwhelming majority. With income trusts, businesses found a way to pay no taxes and shift all the burden on to the unit holder who would get the revenue.

A lot of people do not understand how simple the income trust concept is. Businesses are putting together a corporate structure where there are nothing more than shells, flow through entities. That is what is disastrous.

This was why our American colleagues, who know capitalism better than anyone in the world perhaps, balked at it. They recognized how devastating this would be for a business if the earnings simply flowed through to unit holders with no commitment to hang on to any of that money for research and development or to grow the business and hire more people.

The obligation is to meet this insatiable demand for increased revenue to the unit holders. They suck the life out of a corporation. They stuck it dry. It is corporate greed at its ugliest, at its worst embodiment. It is the manifestation of greed run wild for short term gain and long term pain. That is why no country in the world would allow it. That is what was wrong—

[Petitions, May 16th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I too have a petition from hundreds of Canadians from all over Canada. The petitioners call Parliament's attention to the fact that asbestos is the greatest industrial killer that the world has ever known, yet Canada remains the second largest producer and exporter of asbestos in the world.

They are critical that Canada allows asbestos to be used in building materials, textiles and even in children's toys and that Canada spends millions subsidizing the asbestos industry and blocking international efforts to curb its use.

These hundreds of petitioners call upon Canada to ban asbestos in all of its forms and to end all government subsidies of this killer industry, both in Canada and abroad, and stop blocking international efforts to protect workers from asbestos, such as the Rotterdam Convention.

[Settlement of International Investment Disputes Act, May 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my Bloc colleague's comments raised as many questions as they gave information about the view of this very complex international convention. The points made by the previous speaker, the member for Timmins—James Bay, cited a number of very legitimate concerns and provided reasons why the NDP will oppose Bill C-53.

The NDP is very concerned that the ICSID falls under the jurisdiction of the World Bank, an organization that the NDP has cited numerous concerns about in the past, partly in terms of transparency but also in terms accessibility for users of this tribunal process, this quasi-judicial arbitration process.

I am concerned that the House of Commons today, as we entertain Bill C-53, is not digging deep enough into how we envision this tribunal unfolding and the precedent setting status that it will have.

One of the most alarming concerns that I would like my colleague to comment on is that one of the arguments used by the government in favour of ratifying the international convention is that ICSID shelters foreign investors from the courts of any country or jurisdiction in which the investment is made. I thought we would be alarmed that we are setting up some kind of a dual parallel process that will shelter investors from the courts in the jurisdiction in which the investment is taking place.

In other words, this quasi-judicial arbitration process being set up by the World Bank will have precedence and primacy over the courts of the provinces of Quebec or Manitoba or the Federal Court if it, in fact, is an investment in the federal jurisdiction.

Are we prepared to cede that jurisdiction to an outside party such as the World Bank? Is our confidence in the World Bank such that we are willing to forgo our own court's jurisdiction? If we are interested in the best interests of Canadians, we should be throwing our confidence and faith in our own court system and let this foreign investor be judged by our high standards instead of a new arbitration process, which will likely be residenced in Washington, D.C. and under the jurisdiction of the World Bank.

[Settlement of International Investment Disputes Act, May 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the story we have heard from the member for Timmins—James Bay is one of the most incredible tales I have ever heard in my life. I was spellbound by it. It is like an epic saga. My colleague has a background in the arts. I think he should write an epic poem about the saga of the Adams mine along the lines Beowulf or something like that. This is unbelievable.

I want to ask my colleague if I understood this correctly, because it is almost an unbelievable story. Does the member mean to say that we have a Canadian businessman, given investor state status through NAFTA, suing the nation state of Canada, or Ontario, for lost opportunity because he cannot do what he wants to do in this mine that he says he owns? Is that how convoluted our international trade agreements are?

First, do I understand that he is not even an American, that he is not an out of country businessman who has lost opportunity in this country, but rather a Canadian who somehow calls himself an American and says he has been inconvenienced and has lost $350 million worth of lost opportunity? Is that how twisted this story really is?

[Ministerial Expenses, May 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians should not have to go on a scavenger hunt to find out what their ministers are spending. Canadians are fed up with this lack of transparency.

For the Conservatives to use the Liberals as the yardstick by which they measure accountability, it would be comical if it were not so sad. It is like choosing between wanton excess and wretched excess.

Will the minister stop hiding behind these lame excuses, stop hiding behind his House leader, and tell us why he does not disclose all of his expenses, so we do not have to use a magnifying glass to figure it out?

[Ministerial Expenses, May 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, we hardly expect the Minister of Labour to do his job on a bicycle, but we do expect him to disclose how much he is spending on travel, where he has been travelling to, and who has been going with him on his trips.

I should not have to file an access to information request to learn that one of the minister's charter flights, where the expense was listed as zero, actually cost $41,822.

Why did the minister hide this figure? What is he ashamed of and just what was he doing on this $41,822 flight?

[Aboriginal Affairs, May 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the social condition of Canada's first nations people is this country's greatest failure and this country's greatest shame.

Today the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations served notice that decades of round tables, consultations and royal commissions have gone nowhere and have done nothing to improve the social conditions of the people that he represents. The national chief served notice that his people are losing hope and that when young people lose hope, desperation can lead to social unrest and civil disobedience.

It was in 1990 that social unrest among first nations led to the Oka crisis. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples bought a decade of peace, but in the absence of any meaningful progress, we should recognize that peace is a finite commodity.

We should be grateful and recognize and pay tribute to the leadership of first nations who have kept a lid on the boiling pot of social unrest among their people. We should serve notice to the government of today that it must act meaningfully today.