Thank you, sir.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
I'm one of the 500,000 men and women who make their living in one of Canada's biggest and most important industries, the building and construction trades. Shortly put, we build the nation.
We've had a number of fairly important and I think shared concerns with the current Government of Canada dealing with energy, pipelines, nuclear, natural resource extraction, and looking after Canadian veterans. We've been a pretty reliable partner on that with industry and with government.
We would like to build a stronger Canada. What we said we were going to do on that subject with you, we have done. We have done it through regulatory reform, through the pipeline debates, and through Bill C-45. We think the current private member's bill will make a lot of our members question why we would bother to try to work with the Government of Canada. I'm here to ask you not to make a mistake.
We're about putting people to work. What's at stake here is the use of the taxation power of the Government of Canada to punish a perceived enemy that a number of people think has never supported us since Confederation.
Let me put the argument on a higher plane. If the dues paid by a union member are moneys deducted from income prior to tax being paid, then union dues are taxpayer-funded. This premise is wrong, both in law and in logic: the union member gets the tax break, not the union, but let me indulge this for a moment without conceding the point.
If the public policy principle is that if the taxpayer funds it, then the taxpayer gets to know about it, look at your own return when you file it. Line 212 of the income tax return provides for annual union, professional, or like dues. They may be deducted in order to calculate net income. This should apply to doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, engineers, human resource professionals, and a host more, because those sorts of organizations are funded by tax dollars. If they are funded by tax dollars, why would they not be required to disclose, if this is solid public policy?
There are thousands of employer organizations in this country. There are thousands of other not-for-profit, industry-based advocacy organizations that are funded by dues deducted from pre-tax income of corporate Canada. This must of course mean that they are funded by tax dollars. If it is sound public policy to require unions to disclose, why would they not be required to disclose?
The mother of all tax breaks is the 75% of the first $350 we get from our political donations, and that is actually a tax credit for tax paid. The mandate of political parties is to nominate candidates, to set out platforms, to elect leaders—one of whom will eventually become the prime minister of the country—and to affect the country. If political parties are funded by tax dollars, are they required to disclose? The answer is yes, but it is a simple financial statement. There is no breakdown. It is all aggregated data. There is nothing that will tell you what someone has done.