Mr. Speaker, I accept your comment with the utmost humility, as you are quite right.
I talked about the narrative of this nation and how in many respects, the bill is not in keeping with it. I am the heritage critic. There are many aspects of heritage I have seen over the past year and a half that have caused great trouble. One in particular is with regard to Library and Archives Canada. I have a paper sent to me from a gentleman by the name of Jim Clifford. He is involved with ActiveHistory.ca, and he brings up some very salient points:
Library and Archives Canada also experienced a wave of job losses last summer with the termination of twenty-one archivists and archival assistant positions, a fifty per cent reduction in digitization and circulation staff, and the elimination of the interlibrary loans program. The cuts compounded past reductions in the LAC budget and the series of “modernization” policies that have reduced public access to archival materials and compromised the ability of LAC to acquire new records.
This is a legitimate concern, because instead of saying that we are going to pare down the budget, look at a substantial review, look at practices within certain departments that are inefficient and eliminate them or put them on hold until a later date when we can afford them, the Conservatives, like many governments nowadays, are saying that they are going to make these cuts, and it will be better for them. They will give them less food, but they will feel more full. Where is the logic in that?
Library and Archives Canada is a good example. They claim that it will be that much more efficient and that much better for the end-user, in this case, anyone who wants to find out about the history of this country and the story behind who we are. They are going to have trouble doing that. There is less service.
Parks Canada land across this country, millions of square kilometres, are some of the greatest places in this country to experience what it is to be from this country, whether it is the mountains of the west coast, Wood Buffalo National Park and the sensational scenery there, Ontario, or even the national park where I am from, which is Terra Nova National Park. Parks Canada was hit the hardest by layoffs in the civil service as a result of last year's budget. It was $29 million annually, resulting in an estimated 638 job losses. This is quite a hit to take.
What we expect from this particular implementation bill and other bills that follow is the transparency to say that this is how we are going to pare down these services. What the Conservatives do not do is to seek the advice of those who are involved in day-to-day operations, as illustrated by Library and Archives Canada and Parks Canada. Now we see, paramount to a lot of things in Bill C-60, that it also contains this measure.
I received correspondence from the Independent Media Arts Alliance about the presence of the Treasury Board in negotiations in crown agencies. Here is what it says:
The arm's length relationship is so fundamentally important to the Canadian Council for the Arts and other institutions.... It greatly undermines the spirit and principle of the crown corporation, which while having a direct connection to the federal government is meant to be “shielded from constant government intervention and legislative oversight and thus generally enjoys greater freedom from direct political control than government departments”.
There we see a fundamental difference. Fittingly, over the past six to eight years, we brought to the Conservatives problems with certain crown agencies. The answer was always that they had no direct control. What does this mean now? If something happens with a crown agency, can we say that this is not true any more, because they have direct control over certain aspects? We are now telling Treasury Board that it must get involved in these collective agreements. That is step one. What is next?
Will the mandate of the CRTC also be controlled from the PMO or other sources? This is our fear. I think many Canadians understand that this is a fundamental step backward, certainly over the past four or five years. This particular government does not want to involve itself, yet it does. It is trying to play this side and that side of the story.
Budget 2013 imposes a net tax increase of $3.3 billion in the next five years. One of my hon. colleagues across the way said in the House about two years ago that a tax is a tax. It could be a fee. It could be an adjustment in how we pay fees in this country. No matter what it is, if the government raises the amount of money extracted from the general public, it is a tax.
Some were talking about the so-called iPod tax. Interestingly, with the change recently in tariff regulations, we find that the price of iPods and other items like that are going up. To quote my hon. friend in the Conservative Party, a tax is a tax is a tax. Who is doing the iPod tax?
This is the iPod shuffle. There are many other shuffles we continue to deal with in the House. They appear in the fine print. Over the past three years, budget implementation legislation has always contained fine print that we talk about in the House.
It was the same with EI changes. We did not realize there were changes until people called my office and said that they had to take a job that was an hour's drive away. A women who lived in St. John's told me that she was told that she would have to go to Clarenville. Here was the catch. After taking a ferry for 30 minutes, she would have to drive three and a half hours to get there.
If people have problems with employment insurance, they have the right to appeal. The umpires and the appeals process are being cut. It is being pared down to the bare minimum, which will also make it extremely difficult for these people.
I started by saying that $3.3 billion in the next five years will be an incremental increase. There are safety deposit boxes; dividend tax credits; the deduction for credit unions, which will be crippling for many rural towns' financing; tariff increases; the general preferential tariff, which I spoke about earlier, which is the new iPod tax; character conversion transactions; trust loan trading; mining expenses; life insurance arrangements. The total increase is $5.5 billion.
It is rather disingenuous when the Conservatives put out the same line over and over again. They keep saying that it is their low-tax plan. At some point, people will say, and certainly in my riding they are saying it, that they are not buying that any more.
In this particular instance, when it comes to Bill C-60, some things are positive, but by and large, most things are negative, and therefore I will not be voting for this particular piece of legislation.