Madam Speaker, I am glad of the opportunity to speak to this issue. I have been very interested in charities for some years and have done quite a study of them.
Motion No. M-318 operates on the premise that less governance is better and to devolve government social services to independent organizations is a better thing. If Motion No. M-318 were acted upon, billions of dollars would go into charities as opposed to government services. We would notice immediately the effects of changing the tax credit structure with respect to charities.
Motion No. M-318 operates on the premise that if more money is given to charities, the charities will provide the services better than government. It ignores the reality that charities operate with the least level of transparency and accountability of any organizations in Canadian society today. At least when government provides services, government bureaucracies are accountable. Various legislation controls the transparency of how government bureaucracies operate. In the case of charities, this is not so, as it applies to all non-profit organizations.
An illustration of that is the Canada Corporations Act which provides standards of corporate governance and transparency and accountability to for-profit organizations. It provides nothing for non-profit organizations. Charities and non-profit organizations can operate and have no requirement under law to be transparent and accountable.
Members opposite propose that what is necessary in society is to give more power over social services to organizations that are not accountable to the people. These organizations are accountable to their board of directors, but there is no legislation that guarantees that the executive members of the charity actually have to report the truth to the board of directors. Therefore we have a situation where many charities operate at a high level of inefficiency.
I will give a classic example. In Ontario the Harris government has been cutting back on hospitals. It is causing all kinds of problems in health care. The hospitals have been ordered to cut 20% from their total spending. Lost are the nurses, the medical care and the beds. The administrators stay on. The administrators are not hurt. The administrators actually raise their salary.
Increasingly, talking to my Ontario colleagues, I find the Ontario government is becoming aware that it is not good enough just to cut a charity. If someone cannot control how that charity actually spends its money, if there is a cut like that, the administrators of those charities are the ones who will benefit. So in Ontario we have a very severe problem. I suggest it is because hospitals are charities.
The anecdotal evidence of the directors of hospitals not being informed by their own executive, the administrators of those hospitals, of the operation of the hospital is everywhere.
Anyone who has ever served on the board of directors of a hospital realizes that as a director they cannot get good information on how that hospital operates. We are talking about charities just in the hospital sector involving billions and billions of dollars.
The Reform Party motion operates on the premise of getting government out of the supplying of social services, returning it to the community.
If we do not have rules, if we do not have legislation in place that governs how our organizations spend money, then we are abrogating our very responsibility as politicians. We are here to serve the people of Canada who pay taxes to make sure those taxes are spent efficiently and well.
If we abrogate that responsibility, if we give it down the line to organizations that are not connected to the government and we do not set rules and legislation in place that govern those organizations, we are absolutely betraying the trust of the people of Canada.
I suggest Motion No. 318 is certainly a motherhood and apple pie issue. I also suggest that it is a politically correct issue because the people putting the motion forward think across Canada people everywhere will automatically support charities. One member opposite said that all he had to do was check in his constituency and he would find that everyone supports charity.
I suggest to members opposite that they do that. They will find that in Canadian society today, for very good reason people are more and more suspicious that the charities supposed to be doing the good work are, in many instances, extremely self-serving.