moved that Bill C-205, an act to provide for parliamentary scrutiny and approval of user fees set by federal authority and to require public disclosure of the amount collected as user fees, be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to finally be able to stand and speak in favour of this bill that I have introduced, Bill C-205, the user fee act.
I will start by quoting from the auditor general's report from 1993. He said:
We are concerned that Parliament cannot readily scrutinize the user fees established by contracts and other non-regulatory means. There does not exist a government-wide summary of the fees being charged, the revenues raised and the authorities under which they are established.
He went on to say:
We have recommended that the Treasury Board review and report to Parliament on the adequacy of the current legislative and administrative framework for establishing user fees, and provide Parliament with government-wide summary information on fees being charged.
This is an important issue to many Canadians around the country. In 1996 user fees raised about $3.8 billion for the government coffers without absolutely any parliamentary scrutiny. We believe that that is taxation without representation. Pretty clearly, others feel the same way.
I sit on the finance committee and I can tell you we had a number of representations from different groups, a lot of agricultural-type groups who came before us to complain specifically about how easy it is for the government and the bureaucracy to start to raise user fees, again without really very much scrutiny, with very little regard for the impact it is having on the various sectors of the economy.
If you look back over the history of this issue, one of the things you come to suspect very quickly is that the government is really using user fees to simply tax people more. It is a way for the government to come up with more revenue and not necessarily just for cost recovery.
It is interesting that in the February 1995 federal budget the finance minister sent bureaucrats in search of $600 million in new revenue in a program he called cost recovery. This should cause us to be pretty suspicious. The government was in a terrible pinch in 1995. The finance minister ordered his bureaucrats to collect $600 million from the hides of people who were doing business with the government. That is being done through user fees.
The intended purpose of this bill is to fulfil concerns raised by the auditor general in his 1993 report. Essentially it would require scrutiny by the appropriate standing committee of the House of Commons before any user fee is set or increased. The regulating authority, that being an agency or department, would be required to submit a proposal to the committee for review before any user fee is established or increased.
Madam Speaker, I might ask that you to give me a signal when I have used up about eight minutes of time. Then I will wrap up fairly quickly thereafter to allow my colleague to say a few words.
We believe beyond the issue of accountability, which is obviously an important issue, taxation without representation is pretty close to the wallets and the hearts of a lot of people as an issue they are concerned about. Apart from that is the issue of fairness.
It is difficult to judge whether or not the government is allowing user fees to pad shrinking budgets and appropriations. I can tell you that people are very concerned about it. I want to illustrate what I mean by reading from a brief which was presented to the finance committee a month or two ago. It comes from the Crop Protection Institute. It says:
Federal departments have very little acumen for accountability and management of cost recovery initiatives, as evidenced by experience with the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA), whose $12 million cost recovery target is realizing a $4.5 million shortfall, as predicted by industry, while the agency's performance and client orientation remain poor.
The cumulative impact of multiple cost recoveries within the Agri-Food value chain (i.e. pesticide registration, food inspection, veterinary drug registration, navigation system usage etc.) stifles this sector's potential to consistently deliver a trade surplus. The business impact test, while very useful, does not measure the effect of multiple cost recoveries within the interrelationships of a value chain.
While the government has increasingly chosen to have mandatory services paid for through user fees, instead of from consolidated revenues, this switch has not been accompanied by lower tax rates. Thus, businesses subject to user fees have actually had their cost of doing business increased by the government, impacting negatively on their ability to compete globally.
It is pretty obvious when there is a power that is granted to the bureaucracy to go ahead and start to raise user fees, but on the other hand there is no check on that power, no real parliamentary scrutiny. It allows the government to do things that are quite damaging to business. We are very concerned about that. We have seen this continue for some time despite the warnings of the auditor general. Although the government has done some things, it simply has not gone far enough to deal with the problems that industry has pointed to.
Some would argue, as the gentlemen from the Crop Protection Institution does, that user fees put us at a competitive disadvantage. I can tell you this from personal experience, Madam Speaker. There is a meat packing plant, IBP Lakeside, in my home town of Brooks, Alberta. It is having a terrible time contending with large increases in user fees which the government has slapped on them, while trying to remain competitive in what is a global marketplace.
They have to compete with the Americans and others around the world. These user fees make it extraordinarily difficult for them to do this.
It is interesting to note that if the user fees that are paid are combined at all three levels of government, it amounts to about $23 billion a year in this country, more than Canadians pay toward the hated GST.
I want to conclude by simply pointing out that there really is a trend for the government to use user fees to raise new revenue. I point to the new immigration head tax, $975. There is a passport fee that was increased from $35 to $60, beginning in 1997.
This is interesting. Fisheries Canada started collecting $15 million in recreational boat licences. In other words, people who did not used to have to worry about that are now going to be paying I think $15 a boat so that this money can go back into the department, ostensibly for them to increase their surveillance and that sort of thing.
Suffice it to say, without checks, without the ability of Parliament, in this case through a committee to go ahead and look at these sorts of things, it really does amount to taxation without representation. It is $3.8 billion a year.
I urge my colleagues around the House to seriously consider the objections that are being raised by the business community and by regular people, people who use parks, people who go fishing, about the unbridled use of user fees as a way for the government to increase its revenues.
I would encourage them to consider this and work with me to encourage the people at public accounts to seriously consider this issue and perhaps actually implement at least part of what we are suggesting.