I'm going to focus a lot of my remarks on direction and control, because I think it's an incredibly important topic in terms of how it's holding back Canadian charities. I want to start with the text of the subamendment that is in front of us. A couple of dates really stood out to me. As you know, I'm not a regular member of this committee, so I came to this a little bit later, but I was just shocked at some of the dates contained in here.
Look at Friday, May 20, to have all of these other committees report back to us. I think it's almost unfair, and certainly undemocratic, to give them a little bit more than a week to report. Then, on whether they want to participate or not, the Friday, May 13 date is just not workable or doable. Then, to be pushing us into clause-by-clause within an incredibly short period of time...which I hopefully will demonstrate.
I'm going to talk about one small section of this omnibus bill. I might add, as my colleague's pointed out, that the Prime Minister did say, and actually campaigned heavily on back in 2015, back in the “sunny ways” days, that these wouldn't exist underneath his government. I think it's fair to say that he has backslid on this as well as several other commitments to democracy. I certainly do not want to be in any way part of or party to declining democracy here in Canada.
Just so the committee can fully understand the relevance of what I want to talk about, this is just one small section of the legislation, which is a huge, massive, 400-plus page omnibus bill. I was enlightened by my colleague that evidently inflation is actually increasing the size of this bill, initially at 423 pages and I believe now at over 450 pages.
One small section, I think less than five pages of amendments, is with respect to direction and control and own activities. Let me sort of explain and understand this. Our Income Tax Act is now at well over 3,000 pages. One thing it governs in those 3,000 pages is in fact charities. I might mention that this committee has called for a review of the Income Tax Act for many years. Our Income Tax Act now is a competitive disadvantage for us. Many countries have completed white papers in the last decade to bring their income tax acts up to modernity.
As the Income Tax Act has an incredible impact on our society, I think as government we owe it to Canadians to keep it at least current and modern, and to reflect the preferences of Canadians. The fact that we haven't done that and that this government hasn't responded to the finance committee's multiple calls through multiple years is disappointing. Unfortunately, it is of course hurting Canadians.