Mr. Speaker, with great respect to the hon. member's very able argument, I think he has misconstrued the point in Standing Orders 79 and 80 of the House of Commons.
Standing order 79(1) reads:
This House shall not adopt or pass any vote, resolution, address or bill for the appropriation of any part of the public revenue, or of any tax or impost, to any purpose that has not been first recommended to the House by a message from the Governor General in the session in which such vote, resolution, address or bill is proposed.
He is quite correct in stating that is the case.
Bill S-9, an act to amend the Canada-U.S. tax convention, is not a bill for appropriating any part of the public revenue or for any tax or impost. What it does is change the effect of the taxation laws of Canada through the application of various rules under this tax convention, which may result in the refund of revenues already received by the Government of Canada. This is not an expenditure of government funds; this is a refund of money that was collected from Canadian citizens pursuant to the tax laws of Canada, which are being amended by this tax convention because similar moneys were taken from these persons as a result of the application of the tax laws of the United States.
Everyone in the House is aware that tax conventions exist for the purpose of avoiding double taxation on the citizens of the two countries involved in the convention.
The hon. member has misconstrued the repayment of tax revenues already received as appropriations of public money. That was not the intention either of the standing order or of the constitutional practice in this regard. In support of that submission I refer Your Honour to citation 599 of Beauchesne's sixth edition:
If any motion, whether in the House or in a committee, requires, but fails to receive, the recommendation of the Crown, it is the duty of the Speaker to announce that no question can be proposed upon the motion, or declare the bill out of order, or to say that the problem may be rectified by the proposer obtaining a Royal Recommendation.
I do not disagree with that. Citation 600 states:
The principle that the sanction of the Crown must be given to every grant of money drawn for the public revenue applies equally to the taxation levied to provide that revenue.
In other words, a royal recommendation is required on a bill to impose a tax on the subject-and this bill does not; there is no dispute on that-and any bill to authorize the expenditure of public funds.
There is no expenditure authorized. What is authorized here is different. It is a refund of taxation which has been taken from the subject that is being changed by virtue of the application of the tax treaty. The tax treaty was ratified in the other place in the form of this bill which has been sent to the House for concurrence and the committee was very properly studying concurrence in the bill.
In my experience, and I have watched this kind of procedure for some time, tax conventions are almost invariably introduced as bills in the other place. Many of those tax conventions as a result of their passage involve repayment of money to Canadian citizens. In my experience there has not been a royal recommendation attached to any of those bills. There could not have been, or they would not have been introduced in the other place first.
They are introduced there because it is permissible to introduce technical bills of that kind in the Senate, the ones that do not require royal recommendation. That has been done in this case. In my experience it has been the invariable practice with respect to tax convention implementation legislation. I submit there is nothing irregular in this procedure. The hon. member has simply misconstrued the notion of refund of taxation as an expenditure of public funds. I submit they are not the same.