Madam Speaker, I regret very much that I have the opportunity to debate Bill C-43 this afternoon because I do not think this bill is necessary at all. This is a good example of unnecessary meddling. It is ideological child's play, or incompetent bungling, or a hidden agenda. I am not sure what to call it when it comes to this government and Bill C-43.
I certainly have never had constituents, other than people who felt they had been done some particular injustice, cry for the quasi privatization of Revenue Canada. I do not think the government is responding to any real need, except perhaps a need to cook the books with respect to how many employees there are in the federal public service.
Revenue Canada's 40,000 employees make up about 20% of the federal public service. This particular bill would also involve the transfer of more than $2 billion in annual parliamentary estimates.
It seems to me that what the government is up to here is it is creating the impression that it is somehow downsizing the public service. Then two or three years from now, whenever this becomes a reality, the government can say that it eliminated 20,000 employees from the public service payroll and that it should be lauded or should get some right wing award or medal for how many public servants it eliminated. It seems to me that is part of what is going on and I want to say how strongly I object to it.
I happen to have the taxation data centre for western Canada in my riding. Many hundreds of Canadians work there, many full time as well as part time early in the spring when people's tax returns are due.
I was recently there to participate with many of the workers, hundreds of them again, when they were demonstrating in favour of pay equity, when they were showing their anger at this government for not respecting the judgment of the tribunal. This government is now adding insult to injury. Not only is it saying to these people that it will not respect the tribunal's judgment on pay equity, but it is also going to change the nature of the government department they work for in such a way as to make them much more vulnerable than they are now.
I would say with confidence that I speak on behalf of hundreds of my constituents and those who live in surrounding constituencies who work at the taxation data centre when I register my opposition to Bill C-43 and the intention of the government to establish the Canada customs and revenue agency.
I said earlier that I thought this was completely unnecessary. One of the arguments for that is that there is certainly not the kind of support we would want from the provinces if we were going to create such an agency.
The government is moving toward this independent agency without the support of four major provinces and, as I have already said, it does not have the support of the majority of its workers. The major stakeholders are not buying it. Certainly the citizens of this country have not indicated any great desire for this to happen.
Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island are firmly opposed. B.C. and Saskatchewan have not endorsed the concept. All provinces generally see the agency as an intrusion into provincial jurisdiction.
Canadian businesses have major reservations about the proposed agency. There is certainly a concern that a lot of people have, whether they be in business or ordinary citizens or whomever, that we might see down the line this new Canada customs and revenue agency becoming out of control, becoming something like the IRS in the United States which has a history of working according to quotas, of intimidating and harassing taxpayers in order to get a certain return on its investment one might say. We do not want to have this kind of system in our country.
There has been no demonstrable need or desire for changing Revenue Canada in this drastic way. The jobs of tens of thousands of civil servants are being put in jeopardy here. It seems this is one more instance of an ideological fetish or fixation on the part of this government for forms of privatization and quasi-privatization that it would do well to give up on.
We have seen the downside of privatization in a number of other instances. We saw it just last week when CN was laying off 3,000 people simply to please its shareholders, not because there was any particular need to lay off these people, not because there was not work for them to do.