Mr. Speaker, I am glad we finally got to Group No. 2. I also regret that we have time allocation on this so that we cannot express our genuine concerns about these things.
While we have been sitting here I wrote my newspaper column. One of the things I put in my column is that there are two ways of getting legislation through the House. One is to engage in a fair and an even handed debate, negotiation, give and take, and to come up with a set of rules that is good for people.
I hope that when Canadians trust us to form the government I will not have changed my mind on this. I believe it is a legitimate role for the government to listen to what members in opposition are saying. I noticed one of the members over there gave a hearty laugh. I guess he is eagerly looking forward to being on this side of the House again.
When that happens I think it will be important for us, when we are on the government side, to recognize that everything may not be perfect every time. If I have any role to play in it, I will listen very carefully to what the Liberals on this side of the House have to say on our legislation. I hope we will have the humility to receive fairly legislation the Liberals bring to our attention that they feel is not as good as it could be.
I have not spoken on this group at all and so I would like to address myself primarily to the motions put forward by the Reform Party, although the others also have merit. I am not going to spend as much time on those.
I am going on the assumption that this independent agency will happen. We have seen this over and over. The government will arrange for this vote to pass. This government has already, with its majority, voted for closure. I think this is the tenth time in the last few months.
I will not mention names since I am not allowed and I will not mention ridings since I do not want to embarrass anyone here, but some in the Liberal Party when they were in opposition raised a hue and cry when time allocation was used by the Conservatives of the day. The Liberals said this is wrong, it is a defeat of democracy. The Liberals had all sorts of bad things to say about the use of closure. Now they are on the other side and on command they vote in favour of it.
I suppose I am setting myself up for another quotation maybe four or five years down the road, whenever the next election is, when we form the government.
I think it is important to listen to these debates and to when an amendment is put forward to improve it. That is what I am trying to do now. I know members will not have been given the freedom by their party to vote in favour of these very reasonable and rational taxpayer protecting amendments.
I wonder if we would find among them some statesmen, if we would find among them some politicians who will rise up and represent the people who sent them here, the electors, and they will vote in favour of those people instead of simply following the party line. The purpose of my speech is to persuade Liberal members to do that and to give them solid reasons for so doing.
One of the problems with this agency is the question of accountability. Right now we have some degree of prime ministerial accountability. We have some ministerial accountability. Last night on TV I saw a clip of the Prime Minister when he was leader of opposition. He wagged his finger and said “when we form government you can count on it that ministers will accept responsibility”. We have seen a number of instances in the last little more than five years where that has really not quite been the case. Of course, the Prime Minister continues to say they have no scandals, because what he does is pinch his eyes shut and pretend they are not there and then he can proclaim that there were no scandals. There have been a couple. The Prime Minister said he believes in ministerial responsibility.
What I want to do right now is simply challenge the Liberal members when the vote is held on these amendments to vote in favour of Motion No. 3. Motion No. 3 increases the responsibility and the accountability of this new agency to parliament instead of making it into a faceless irresponsible bureaucracy whose function is to separate the taxpayers from their money and which will not have political of any other kind of accountability to parliament.
We insist that should be done. We want to ensure that the employees, the directors and the commissioner of the new agency are held accountable not to the minister in the backrooms but to parliament directly. I do not think anyone on the Liberal side, if they were on this side and the Reformers were speaking on the other side, would be against this motion. They would vote in favour of it.
Let us not allow walking across two sword lengths of aisle change important principles we believe in. I would simply urge them to do the right thing for taxpayers. I suppose basically everyone n the country is affected by this legislation. That is another reason why it is so odious for the government to have invoked closure on this.
It is absolutely necessary that the government so arrange its affairs that people believe in our government and believe in our tax system. Our tax system is predicated on voluntary compliance. If that is missing, the system falls apart.
We have seen it in the last number of years where with the very undemocratic imposition of the GST many people have gone into the underground economy. They do not agree with it. They said it was not done correctly. They did not have representatives representing them in parliament.
If we just jam this legislation through, two days of debate and it is finished. It is a fait accompli. It is mandatory for us. We have no option but to make sure people support this legislation.
We should take the full length of debate on it so that we as members of parliament can hear what our constituents are saying and we can respond to them and make sure the taxation system is fair, which I believe most people believe in. I have yet to hear anyone in my riding say to me they do not want to pay any taxes at all. But I have heard many times that they want fair taxation and a fair taxation system.
If we vote in favour of Motion No. 3, put forward by my Reform colleague, it would help to provide accountability of this new agency to parliament. It would help people to have faith in and to really have a good feeling about paying their taxes, something they have never had before in their lives. I am sure the Liberals would want the taxpayers to feel good when they send their money to Ottawa.