Mr. Speaker, I will raise a few points at report stage of Bill C-20, which is to privatize NavCan, and on the group of motions we are currently speaking on.
I listened to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport just a few minutes ago. He explained the tradeoffs between the Minister of National Defence and NavCan: I will not charge you for your services if you do not charge me for the services I provide to you. This is a wonderful way to do business.
Perhaps that is why NavCan is being created to be one of these not for profit organizations. Perhaps profit and efficiency are not the operative points which are trying to be achieved with this exercise. It is only an exercise to move the civil servants who work in the air navigation industry off the government payroll into some other organization which is far enough removed that there is no accountability. It will not be part of the normal operation of government and therefore will be removed from the scrutiny of the House. That is the point I will speak to.
If NavCan is to be a privatized organization, why would it provide services for free and expect services for free when there seems to be no real relationship between the services being provided, other than to have a gentleman's agreement to ignore them? Is that privatization? Does that seem to be the way the private sector does business? The Income Tax Act calls that barter and it is taxable.
The government is saying again that the rules that operate in the private sector do not apply to the government because the government makes the rules. The fundamental problem with much that comes out of the government is that it creates its own little environment by saying it makes the rules and it will say how the game is played.
The government is going to call this privatization. NavCan is a not for profit organization. It is not designed to make a profit. It is a cost plus organization. It is going to remove 6,500 people from the civil service and put them into this organization which will be removed from parliamentary scrutiny.
As well there will be no scrutiny by the Auditor General of Canada. It is not a crown corporation as defined in the Financial Administration Act. The government has come up with a new
hybrid. Therefore the auditor general has not been given the mandate to scrutinize NavCan, as he has with other crown corporations.
What is the government trying to achieve? When it set up Nav Canada, it had all these assets, computer equipment, buildings and goodness knows what else paid for by the taxpayer. What did it say? It told NavCan to go out into the money markets and borrow $1.5 billion. It is going to sell the assets to NavCan for cash. That is fine for the Minister of Finance because it helps him to meet his deficit reduction targets this year.
I come back to the very point that the parliamentary secretary made. These trade-offs and these gentlemen's agreements which are made are totally and absolutely banned by the Income Tax Act and not allowed in the private sector, yet he openly admits that it is the trade-off made. The government does not want to figure out how these services are to be valued. The parliamentary secretary thinks it is a good deal for Canadian taxpayers. I doubt it.
This organization, Nav Canada, is far removed from public scrutiny yet it has been given a monopoly. It has been given virtual taxing powers. There is absolutely no constraint on the way it spends its money. There is no constraint on what it says it needs and is going to pass on to the consumer, the airlines and so on. It will pass on costs through tickets to the Canadian consumer.
The government tells us that this is good for Canadians. The President of the Treasury Board admitted in committee the other day that the 6,500 civil servants did not lose their jobs but just got a new name on their pay cheques. This is part of his civil service reduction package. That way Canadians think the government is being downsized. Not one of these 6,500 people lost his or her job. On Friday night, they were working for the government and on Monday morning they were working for Nav Canada. We gave them $200 million cash because they got laid off.
These are the types of things that should be debated in the House. The government should be telling Canadians how it is spending their money. It should also be forthright with Canadians that this organization is far enough removed from public scrutiny that it does not have to worry about its financial statements.
I have already said that the Minister of Finance will take a $1.5 billion credit on deficit reduction courtesy of Nav Canada because Nav Canada will borrow the money from the private sector.
This organization is not going to be accountable according to the normal rules of the private sector. The parliamentary secretary has already admitted that the normal rules of the Income Tax Act and barter do not apply in this situation. How can he call it a private sector organization?
Everything the government is doing is obfuscation and deceit as far as this deal is concerned. If it wants to have a true private sector type of organization, it should have said so. If that is not what it wanted, it should at least have given the Auditor General of Canada the power of scrutiny over Nav Canada. That is why we have these problems.
In 5, 10, 15 years from now, people will find out that this organization has runaway costs. Canadian consumers are finally going to rebel and say it is too much. The government is not doing its job today.
Accountability is the number one issue in the private sector. If the government builds in competitiveness and if it expects and demands that Nav Canada work according to the same rules as the private sector, it may have something.
The government has removed NavCan far enough away that it has been swept under the carpet. The government is taking credit. There are 6,500 fewer civil servants. These people are still paid by the Canadian consumer: $1.5 billion deficit reduction claimed by the Minister of Finance courtesy of this equipment that is being used by Nav Canada, but there is no accountability.
Mark my words. If an organization has no accountability, it leads down a very difficult path that usually is the wrong path. I ask the government to think very seriously about that.