Information & Ethics committee  I think there's a strong argument to be made that obviously the nexus is stronger. The greater the funding, the greater the contribution, the greater the input from taxpayers, from citizens. Obviously, I think the demand for accountability, the threshold, should also be lower. The onus should be on them to be more transparent.

Information & Ethics committee  Certainly there are some, and really it's a question of priority. I know there was a question, for example, about whether or not the right should be extended to non-Canadians, because the argument was that they already go through a Canadian agent. We think Canadians, being the ones that are paying the bills, deserve priority, so we don't know that this is a high priority.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, my name is Aaron Wudrick. I'm the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. I'm very pleased to appear today, and I thank the committee for its invitation to speak about prospective reforms of the Access to Information Act. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is a federally incorporated, not-for-profit citizens group founded in 1990, with more than 89,000 supporters nationwide.

Finance committee  With the change in government we watch closely the change in policy. With the new Treasury Board president, we certainly saw what he presented as a change in tone. We have no problems with changes in tone. That's entirely his prerogative. As I stressed earlier, we don't begrudge union leaders advocating hard for their membership.

Finance committee  We oppose subsidies to oil and gas, to aerospace, and to the auto sector. We oppose public sector subsidy of private sector businesses.

Finance committee  Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee this evening. My name is Aaron Wudrick and I am the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, or CTF. For those who aren't familiar with our organization, the CTF is a federally incorporated, not-for-profit citizen's group supported by more than 429,000 people across the country.

Finance committee  I'll quickly add that I also definitely am in favour of a simpler system. I lived in Hong Kong briefly and did my taxes there. It was one page. I'd love to see us get back to something like that.

Finance committee  Let's be absolutely clear that we're supportive of balancing budgets. We don't think it's a wise idea to continue borrowing for the sake of borrowing. We wish it hadn't taken this long. We wish, for example, the stimulus hadn't occurred. That's all in the past. As I said, we've been critical, and we think the government deserves equal credit for clawing its way back.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. I obviously agree with your characterization. The money is Canadians' money. The default position is it's their money. The government then takes it from them. To suggest that giving it back to them means that government has lost money, I think is a mischaracterization.

Finance committee  This is a long-standing problem. It actually precedes this government as well. We think that treating EI receipts as a spare fund to dip into is a serious problem that needs to be rectified. Going forward, we welcome the lowering of EI premiums being collected in order to ensure that money isn't being treated as a spare bag of cash for governments to use to balance budgets.

Finance committee  Yes, thank you. We've long been critics of the complexity of the system. We think the system is needlessly complex. We are not fans of continued what we call boutique credits targeted at very specific groups. We think broad-based tax relief is the way to go. As I said, it puts us in a difficult position because we are an organization that likes lower taxes, but we don't like more complicated taxes.

Finance committee  I think the debate fundamentally comes down to a debate about who is best placed to make these decisions. I respect the view of some of our progressive friends who suggest that it's the government's role to fully subsidize the care of children. We dispute that. They've been bandying about the fact that $160 does not cover the full cost of child care.

Finance committee  No, I think he was taking a position that it is not the preferred option of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. I've been consistent in saying that income splitting is not our first choice. It is not. We would prefer a broad-based tax cut. But if the specific question you're asking us is whether we would take a tax cut like income splitting over no tax cut, we would take income splitting.

Finance committee  It's entirely reasonable to say, in isolation, looking at income splitting without any measures addressing any other inequities in the rest of the tax regime, you could make that argument.

Finance committee  Yes, we do. We think, as I stated earlier, that it's a question of like versus like. If you have a household earning x dollars, we don't think that household should pay different tax depending on whether it's being earned by two spouses, one spouse, two spouses earning about the same or two spouses earning a vastly different amount.