Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning, colleagues.
I would also like to speak to this motion. With all due respect, I'm trying to get my head around the perspective of an individual who has experienced a road accident, who has been in a vehicular incident involving a trucker on one of our highways.
We know this occurs. We know this is a serious problem in different parts of the country, but as an individual who has been in that situation, who has been on a fairly empty and underused stretch of the Trans-Canada and has had a trucker collide with my vehicle, I'm trying to understand what that experience would offer me in terms of a perspective on the business model and the abuses of the tax system, which is ultimately at the core of this study and the committee's work.
The testimony we've heard has covered a range of perspectives that speak to why we have, within the trucking sector, such a significant problem of misclassification of individuals who are, in effect, engaged in tax fraud. That is the core of the issue we're examining here, which arises in part because of the consequences of conditions on the road and truckers and individuals who, as we've heard from many of our witnesses, are not sufficiently trained and not been given sufficient preparation by their employers for their role or experience driving these large vehicles, by virtue of the fraud being perpetrated here.
The perspectives that victims would be able to bring to the underlying causes and structures of the Drivers Inc. model that would be pertinent to what we're trying to examine in this committee are not clear to me, Mr. Chair. In fact, it rather feels like an opportunity, as we've seen previously, for some members of this committee to politicize the deaths on our roads and to use the deep pain and grief that we all feel at the loss of life and other suffering associated with unsafe road conditions as something of a wedge, rather than looking for solutions that are going to actually help to mitigate the cause of the problem in the first place.
In addition to that concern, Mr. Chair, about the kind of contributions to problem-solving that deeply traumatized perspective of victims might bring, there is the practicality here about the use of government resources, the considerable demands on the time of the public service—and, at this point, I might suggest distracting them from other work that the opposition members are often quick to criticize and quick to point out is not moving as quickly as they would like, or is not moving to their satisfaction. It is a significantly resource-intensive exercise, Mr. Chair, for public servants to comb through years upon years of documents in order to make them available to opposition members for their sole purpose of seeking to find something in those documents to try to embarrass the government with.
It is not, I would suggest, Mr. Chair, something that will really serve the objectives of this committee to try to identify and to enact actual solutions for a tax fraudulent business model that has become endemic within this sector.
For these reasons, Mr. Chair, I think this committee would be well served to continue the questioning of our witnesses this morning, to continue to engage in this discussion based on the ample evidence and testimony we've already received. We also need to move forward, rather than looking backwards and having not only further delay in our committee process but also seven years' worth of material that, I would suggest, is of rather vague relevance to the issues at hand.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.