Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I served on the Standing Committee on Finance for four years, so I did my penance. For the last year and a half I have not been as close to the work of the Standing Committee on Finance as I was previously. There comes a time when major issues come up that make a Member feel they should get a little bit closer to where things are going on because I found that in all the discussions surrounding the proposed payroll tax, I was getting mixed messages from various members of the committee. It was very unclear to me as to what the issues were that had to be resolved. I remember when we first discussed this act I described it as an elephant trap that was designed to catch something much bigger than a mosquito. It is a very complex proposal that has been made by the Minister of Finance. When I heard that there was uncertainty about this particular bill, I decided to sit in with the Standing Committee on Finance on several occasions over the last several days to see what was the nature of their deliberations so I could have a clear understanding of what the outstanding issues were. I feel badly that, on what may be the very last day of this session, we are now faced with dealing with a very complex bill, 53 pages long, I believe, and more than 70 clauses, many of them of a very complex nature. I have had letters of all kinds from the public, as have many other Members, asking us to vote against this bill. It is very difficult to pass any kind of tax measure in our kind of Assembly because we do not have a party system and we do not have the kind of discipline which says this is our mandate, this is what we are committed to deliver, this is the amount of money we need and therefore we have to raise the amount of taxes by this amount. We are all individuals and we have to look at the nature of the problem and make our decisions accordingly. Having spent these few days with the Standing Committee on Finance, it was very clear that this was a different kind of a bill than we have ever had to deal with before.
I have always been interested, Mr. Chairman, in innovative, new ways of doing things. Is there something different that we could do? I found the bill attractive at the very beginning because what it tried to do was to find a way of getting those people that do not live here but who make their living here, who make money here from our resources and then fly off. They are non-unionized people, by the way, nearly every one of them. They fly off back to some place they have in the south and they do not contribute anything to our economy other than the fact that they labour. They spend their money somewhere else. They do not even spend it here. I was intrigued by this proposal and thought that if we can pull it off in a reasonable fashion I am going to support it because it makes sense that we should try to do that. However, we found that because of the way our country is constituted that if you are going to nail those people from the south you have to nail everybody. This tax provides a one per cent tax on everybody in the Northwest Territories.
However, what the public does not know is that accompanying this is another piece of legislation which gives the money back. The people in the south do not get anything back but the people in the Northwest Territories get money back. In fact, many of them get more money back than what they would have had taken away from them under the payroll tax, and these are the poorer people, not the rich people but the poorer people. The richer people are hit the hardest. I would have thought that the Federation of Labour would have realized that the rich people are going to be hit by this tax and the poor people are going to benefit from it. For that reason I shall be supporting the bill when it comes into this House later on today.