They say it is rubbish but look what has happened. There has been privatization of the CNR, privatization of a lot of companies, the gutting of employment insurance, the health plan, all of these things. Going back to EI, there are many people who cannot even qualify because of the changes to employment insurance which were done not by Brian Mulroney and the Tories, but by the Liberal government across the way.
This bill is another example of that drift to the right. That party over there when in opposition tried to be very progressive in the way it talked. Now that it is in government it is extremely conservative. That is the historical position of the Liberal Party of Canada. I am concerned about that as well.
I also wanted to mention some of the concerns about business itself. This is supposed to make it more cost efficient and easier for business to comply with and so on. As has already been referred to, a study was commissioned by Revenue Canada itself from the Public Policy Forum. What were the results of that study? It said 68% of the people who were questioned thought that there would either be an increase in the costs of compliance or there would be no impact whatsoever in terms of the costs of compliance.
Two-thirds of the business community said it would not matter one way or the other in terms of costs or else their costs would go up. What is the government's reply to that? This is to be done to keep down costs, to make things more efficient. The business community does not seem to agree and the study seems to verify that so why go ahead with it?
That is my third concern. The first one is the provincial opposition, the second one the whole idea of privatization that diminishes the role of the public sector in Canada. The third one is that the business community itself, small businesses and large businesses, are concerned that their costs will either remain the same or increase with this new agency.
The fourth thing I am concerned about is the whole question to which I already referred, that of accountability. Right now we have a government department and a minister who is accountable for Revenue Canada. That has been the practice in this country.
Once we establish a new agency that is at arm's length, that will have a management board, that will draw up a business plan and then report that business plan through a CEO to the Minister of National Revenue, I think there will be less accountability in terms of the Government of Canada to the people of this country. We will have more and more people from the private sector sitting on that board, recommended and nominated by the provinces and so on. It will be more of a private sector orientation.
I also wonder about this new layer of bureaucracy that will be established in terms of the management board. What about the salaries of the CEO and senior executives? Will they reflect the salaries in private corporations instead of the salaries of senior government officials? Senior officials have always received an increase in salaries but their salaries are nowhere near what the CEOs and senior executives in the private sector receive.
This agency would employ 40,000 people and would be one of the largest corporations in the country, a bit smaller than Canada Post at 50,000, but would still be very, very large, and the senior management team received compensation comparable to what we see in the private sector. This will be an additional cost.
I wonder about all these things in terms of accountability. We are getting less and less accountability in our so-called democratic parliamentary system as more and more decision making is taken away. In fact we have had in many ways the privatization of decision making as more decisions are made outside parliament.
Accountability has gone away from this place. We have government backbenchers and MPs all around who have very little say over the public policy direction of the country. This is now another example of some power that is being taken away from the Parliament of Canada.
I am concerned about the size of the agency itself. What we have here is a vision of a super tax collection agency if it evolves. It is being given the power to evolve so we should look at what might happen in 10 or 15 years. It will collect not just federal taxes but will also collect provincial taxes, the gas tax, the liquor tax. It may also collect municipal taxes, property taxes, school taxes and so on. It would be like a mega tax man, like a Frankenstein.
People are concerned about that. They are concerned about evolving into the kind of agency that we see in the United States with the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service, in terms of how that agency is out of control and is arm's length from the Government of the United States.
The IRS, by the way, is still a government department in the United States. The IRS is not an agency in the United States. It operates in a very independent and aggressive fashion. I do not know if we want the kind of tax agency they have in the United States in this country, with the Canadian background and tradition we have of trying to work things out between the provinces, the municipalities and the federal government. The vision of the agency is that of a huge taxation agency which collects all taxes.
I have another concern. One of the purposes—and the minister does not talk about it any more—of establishing the agency was to try to blend the GST with the provincial sales tax, the BST or the HST, the harmonized sales tax.
I remember very well the campaign in 1993. I remember the promise made by the prime minister that if the Liberal Party were elected it would get rid of the GST. Do members remember that one? There is a member on the backbench hanging his head in shame; he is crying. At least the member from Hamilton had the honesty and the integrity to say “yes, that is a promise we made”; to resign her seat; and to face her people in a byelection campaign. However the GST is still there. Why has the GST not disappeared? It is a promise the Liberals made and it is still there.
One purpose of the agency was to get around that campaign promise by abolishing the GST, rolling it into the provincial sales taxes across the country and calling it a harmonized sales tax. They floated the idea with the provinces and the only provinces that agreed were the three Liberal provinces in Atlantic Canada: Mr. Tobin in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia—