Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to speak to Bill C-43, which creates the Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency. This Liberal bill is not new. The government first mentioned it in the throne speech in February 1996.
At the time, like today, the Bloc Quebecois strongly rejected this bill, which we deemed centralizing.
Allow me to explain to you some of the reasons behind our opposition to this Liberal initiative. First, this institution will become a superstructure, a super tax collection institution, which will enable Ottawa to extend its influence to all levels of government.
We already know that this agency sprung from the imagination of senior tax officials in Ottawa. They would really like to control a gigantic fiscal octopus extending its tentacles beyond the provinces to municipal and local administrations.
Their intent is to administer everything from provincial sales taxes to gasoline and alcohol taxes. We should ask ourselves “Do Quebeckers and Canadians want to give such power to a single government agency?” The answer, as you will agree, is no.
We oppose the creation of this agency because the government's obligation to account to the public and to Parliament will be weakened. In its present form, Revenue Canada is responsible to taxpayers through the Department of National Revenue. So at the moment, the government cannot evade difficult questions, such as the family trusts scandal, for example.
However, the new agency would not be subject to the direct control of the House of Commons and would therefore face less rigorous parliamentary scrutiny. Once again, do Canadians and Quebeckers want to have an agency that the government can use as a cover? The answer is no.
This answer becomes even clearer when one is familiar with the Liberal approach to management: they constantly hide behind inquiries and independent agencies to avoid answering embarrassing questions. That is how they reacted to the questions raised concerning the involvement of senior military officers in the Somalia affair. That is also how they reacted to questions on air safety. They reacted the same way with respect to food inspection.
This morning, in the Standing Committee on Health, we heard the assistant to the auditor general and the president of the food inspection agency, another independent agency established recently, which is similar to the one contemplated by the government in Bill C-43: the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.
I urge hon. members to read the section of the auditor general's report dealing with how this transition was handled. When I toured Quebec over the summer, I visited a distribution centre, an income tax return processing centre in the riding of my colleague from Jonquière. I met more than 500 public service employees. All of them cautioned us about two things. The first one is the infamous pay equity issue. I will not bring it up again, because it has already been the subject of extensive debate in this House.
The second point raised by public service employees, residents and voters from the riding of my colleague, the hon. member for Jonquière, is their concern about the agency that will be established under Bill C-43.
Let me go back to this morning's meeting of the standing committee on health. The auditor general once again showed that the transition from the Department of Health to a food inspection agency had generated major distortions. I will not draw a parallel, but allow me to voice my concerns about Bill C-43, which will establish a similar independent agency. I believe there is cause for concern.
My colleague, the Bloc Quebecois critic on this issue and member for Saint-Eustache, expressed concern about it. It is important to take note of that concern.
The government continued in the same vein to avoid having to deal with the Prime Minister's involvement in police violence against students at the Vancouver APEC summit. We refuse to give the Liberal government another excuse to take cover and avoid answering the public's questions in an area as important as the collection of taxes.
The Canada customs and revenue agency could also be prejudicial to people's privacy. As members know, we live in a world where computer technology is becoming increasingly important, and where private sector organizations buy and sell more and more personal information. The federal government has already dealt with the sensitive issue of protecting personal information in Bill C-54.
My colleague from Chambly will be speaking soon. I remember his comments about the concerns raised by Bill C-54. The Liberal government is consistent. It is so uncomfortable with the principle of protecting personal information, that it even attempted to downplay this objective in the title of a bill that is supposed to do just that.
Bill C-54 is entitled an act to support and promote electronic commerce—“support”, “promote” and “commerce” are the three key words—by protecting personal information that is collected, used or disclosed in certain circumstances.
It is obvious that, with this bill, the Liberal government is giving priority to commerce over the protection of personal information. We now fear that it may be pursuing the same objective with this agency, that is to maximize government revenues, without regard for the protection of personal information.
So, the government is consistent, in Bill C-54 and Bill C-43. How can we confidently hand over so much personal information to a super-powerful federal agency, when it was designed by a Liberal government that will not give priority to the protection of personal information over the promotion of unfettered commerce?
The answer is obvious. Canadians and Quebeckers cannot trust such an institution. We have serious concerns about the balance of powers that will prevail within the new federal agency.
Who, exactly, will decide? In the end, who will be accountable? These are questions we have.
I conclude by saying that if the federal government truly wants to improve the administration of tax laws and streamline their application, the solution is simple: Quebec already has a revenue department that does a good job of collecting taxes. The federal government should simply, once and for all, hand over to Revenue Quebec the responsibility for collecting all taxes in Quebec, and it should do the same with all the other provinces that want to do so.
Such decentralization would give some credence to the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, who claimed again yesterday that the Canadian federation was open and decentralized.