Mr. Speaker, I too compliment my colleague from Mississauga South for bringing forward this initiative on an issue which is important to all Canadians.
One principle Canadians want in their tax system above all is fairness. Everybody should pay their fair share.
The underground economy has increased the burden on those law-abiding taxpayers who voluntarily report their income honestly every year. The underground economy has a certain segment of our society saying it will carry on business and benefit from the economy of the country but it will not contribute to it.
It hits us in a number of ways. People who do not report income from jobs they have performed obviously avoid paying income tax on that revenue. They avoid paying the GST and provincial sales tax on the work they have performed. All governments lose when that happens and all Canadians lose.
We have only to sit in the House every day to hear the tremendous financial pressures on the government and on all Canadians. We know we are in a period of finding any way we can to save on expenditures. It is leading to some very difficult decisions which will not necessarily help the economy or our standard of living. However, we know they are necessary because for a number of years now there has been a serious imbalance between what we have to spend and how much we are taking in.
This motion goes to the heart of how much we are taking in. While there may be disagreements about the extent of the underground economy and the amount of money being lost by unreported income, nobody can deny it is substantial and that it has grown dramatically in recent years.
What is it costing us when people are not paying their fair share? We have all heard from constituents who are worried about the future of our health care system. We hear about waiting lists at hospitals. We hear about pressures to close hospitals. Certainly that is very much an issue in Ontario today and in the national capital region.
We hear about reducing the benefits to people who are unemployed and need the assistance of the unemployment insurance system. We hear about a reduction in the money available to those in need to survive through difficult times. We hear about less services being available to support children in our community. We hear about less resources being available to fulfil a major role that Canada has always played in the world in terms of international development. It goes on and on.
This motion gives a committee of Parliament the opportunity to examine how we can bring this under control. There are people who are making money in the economy and cheating their fellow Canadians by not paying taxes on that income. How can we get those people back into the mainstream of society, contributing what they should be contributing so that others do not have to pay more than their fair share? This would make it possible to carry on doing for Canadians those things that are important to the building of a prosperous and sane society.
We all know people who have had work done around their homes. I recently had some work done and as a member of Parliament I insisted on an invoice and that the GST was documented. However I can understand someone who has had their income frozen for the last five years, or perhaps had their income drop because they have moved to another job which pays less, or perhaps is unemployed and has to get some necessary work done, would look for the best possible bargain to get the cheapest possible price, even if they suspect that the person doing the work is not paying the taxes and, therefore, is not paying their fair share of being a member of Canadian society.
This motion offers an opportunity. I want to pay tribute to a constituent of mine who brought a suggestion to my attention a couple of years ago and which I have been promoting with the Minister of Finance and the Minister of National Revenue. The idea is to give homeowners an incentive to ensure that anybody doing work around their home is part of the economy, is contributing, is paying the taxes on that work. It could come from a number of ways.
This motion gives an opportunity to a committee of Parliament to look at a variety of means by which we can start to ensure that the vast majority of Canadians who are honest-and our tax system is really based on honour-and abide by that system are not penalized to the benefit of the very few who choose not to pay their fair share.