“Coercive”, as my colleague says. A coercive and intimidative culture is not what we want to see in the tax collection agency of parliament and of government.
The official opposition has put forward a comprehensive proposal for a taxpayer bill of rights which would enumerate for the first time in federal law a number of rights to due process for taxpayers in the entire tax auditing and collection system.
Essentially our draft taxpayer bill of rights would include the declaration of taxpayers rights first promulgated by the then revenue minister, Mr. Beatty, in 1985. It would give it teeth, legislative force, and would expand on it. It would essentially ensure in legislation that taxpayers were presumed innocent until proven guilty in the tax process. It would reverse the onus which is now on taxpayers who are too often determined to be guilty until proven innocent by the agents of Revenue Canada.
Furthermore, it would give taxpayers various avenues of appeal which are not now open to them. Currently if taxpayers of ordinary means find, as they find in many cases, that they have been unduly targeted by heartless collection agents at Revenue Canada, they have only one real avenue of recourse and that is through the tax court. The vast majority of people of modest means do not have the resources to use the appeal process through the courts. They cannot hire tax lawyers and spend months and years and tens of thousands of dollars defending their basic rights.
We propose as part of our taxpayer bill of rights the adoption of an office for taxpayer protection that would essentially be an ombudsman to adjudicate legitimate disputes between taxpayers and the revenue agency. It would essentially provide an avenue of appeal far less costly and far more accessible to taxpayers than what currently exists.
These two measures, a taxpayer bill of rights and the adoption of an office of taxpayer protection, would go a very long way toward protecting Canadian taxpayers in the new era of the Canada customs and revenue agency. We can see no good reason, nor has the government offered a single good reason, why a taxpayer bill of rights ought not to be introduced and passed alongside the legislation before us today, Bill C-43.
That is why at the outset of our debate over the next couple of days on the amendments to Bill C-43 I would once again call upon my colleagues in government to consider our sincere, detailed and thoughtful proposal for a taxpayer bill of rights. If the minister were to give us an inclination that he was willing to seriously consider the kind of recommendations we have made, we in turn as the official opposition would seriously consider supporting the bill because of some of the incremental administrative efficiencies that may be achieved by it.
Unless and until the government gets the message that Canadians are not satisfied with the level of fairness and due process in the tax collection system and takes some concrete steps to further entrench and protect taxpayers rights, there is no way we could support a bill which has even a slight potential for spinning out of control into an IRS tax style agency.
Our party opposes put forward by my colleague the Bloc Quebecois in Group No. 1 because they are dilatory motions which seek to delete each clause of the bill. We do not think thee are constructive amendments. We feel that many sections of the bill, including those which these motions seeks to delete, are worthwhile incremental improvements. We will oppose the motions in Group No. 1 and oppose the bill unless amended to include a taxpayer bill of rights.