Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to address Bill C-93. When addressing an amendment it is important when doing research to look at the actual act and make some judgments about whether or not the act in itself is a good piece of legislation and whether or not it is appropriate for a political party such as ours to support the act overall. I will touch on the amendment and speak a little more broadly about the overall act.
Both the minister and the hon. member who just spoke talked about the appeal process. Previously there was an appeal process which permitted people to go to Revenue Canada and ultimately to the tax court to get a ruling on the value of a piece of art being donated to a recognized Canadian cultural institution. We do not have problems with that. One big concern we have with respect to the whole issue is the potential for bureaucracy and the potential for abuse. I want to talk about that in a little more detail.
One concern we have is that there is a potential for a board which has been appointed by a government to be very cosy with people in the arts community. Very often they come from the arts community. I am very concerned that we will have a situation similar to what we have in the Canada Council today where artists sit in judgment of other artists. It is a "you scratch my back and I will scratch your back" situation. I can see some real potential for abuse.
To be a little more specific, when appointees are passing judgment on the historical value of papers belonging to former prime ministers who may have appointed them to the board, there is some real concern in my judgment about those types of things. We have to be mindful of this and ensure there are processes in place so that people are not caught in a conflict of interest position.
I know my hon. friend from Okanagan will be talking about that a little bit later.
Another concern is that a lot of these things are going to end up being appealed to the tax court. In my judgment there is very little doubt about that. People will say: "I am getting a raw deal" when they bring their work of art forward and ultimately say: "We want to take this on to the tax court".
This was not something told us officially, but when we were researching this, someone in the department told us there are 22 tax court judges across the country but something like 6,000 cases before the court, an astonishing number. That is a tremendous backlog of cases for determination about the value of these various articles. Given that backlog it may be advisable to allow this to remain in the hands of people who are experts in this field.
I want to talk a little bit more about the actual tax credit system itself. This is an area in which I have grave concerns. This is a tax loophole that definitely benefits wealthy Canadians more than anyone else. In the last budget the government talked very enthusiastically about the need for tax fairness.
I would argue very few ordinary Canadians are going to be able to take advantage of this legislation. Somebody who is a subsistence hunter in northern Canada, a wheat farmer in Saskatchewan or somebody who works in the coal mines in Glace Bay is not going to be able to take advantage of this loophole. The people who are going to take advantage of it are going to be the crème de la crème, the top 1 per cent of income earners. If anyone does not need a tax loophole it is them.
I would encourage the government, when it is engaging in this rhetoric about the need for tax fairness, to think about that for a little while. Not only does this legislation reward them in so far as they are the ones who are most likely to have the important pieces of art that institutions want, but it rewards them in how it has skewed the tax system for them.
Let me give some detail on that. It is amazing. In fact when I read it I could not believe it. Right now the department issues about $60 million in tax credits every year through this legislation. It works like this. If something is donated to one of these institutions the tax credit is far greater than is available for any other type of charity in the country. In fact, normally if you donate to the food bank you can get a tax credit up to 20 per cent of your income. That does not apply to people who are making cultural donations. They can get a tax credit for all of their income. They can carry the tax credit forward into years down the road so that it can be applied against income.
It is an amazingly lucrative way of avoiding paying taxes for the wealthiest of Canadians. If one has an income of several hundred thousand dollars and gets a tax credit through the cultural export review board for $300,000 one will pay no tax. To me that is absolutely ridiculous. I wish the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood was here.