Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to representatives from the CRA for coming today.
Mr. Hamilton, you have probably one of the hardest jobs around. By reason of what you represent, there are not too many Canadians who love the CRA, but that is what it is. It's a necessary thing to have, and you hopefully use all the tools you can and do the best job you can on behalf of all the taxpayers, with the taxpayers.
I think the issue that we constantly face with CRA is one of legitimacy, credibility and faith. If you are tasked with essentially—I'm going to use the word “auditing” for my own structure here—auditing every single Canadian when the time is right to determine whether they are following the rules intentionally or unintentionally, but you're unable to follow the rules intentionally or unintentionally yourself, it leaves a very difficult position for you as an entity, and certainly for Canadians to have faith in the process.
It's funny. As you go through the audit, you go, yes, this is pretty much what I hear. I get that there's variability between regions, but I think we see those variances even within our own ridings. It's very difficult as a member of Parliament, or for our staff, to give advice to individuals, because it's a constantly moving target.
How do you restore that faith? I don't want the bureaucratic answer, right? The bureaucratic answer is that we're going to do better next time; we're going to put the necessary changes in place that we've already talked to the Auditor General about.
There is such a deficit when it comes to faith in the CRA. Some of that's going to be there implicitly, but there's a lot of it that has been caused by this variance or the bad experiences that have taken place, and the inability for the CRA to be able govern itself without need of outside governance to ensure that the job is done right.