Madam Speaker, I am happy to have this opportunity to speak to Bill C-43.
I represent quite a few employees of Revenue Canada in the riding of Winnipeg Centre. The city of Winnipeg is the location of a huge Revenue Canada operation with 5,000 employees. Many of these employees who live in my riding have come to me with a great deal of apprehension and a great deal of fear about what this new superagency really means for them.
No one we have talked to can point to any compelling reasons that we are making this move toward a superagency. If anything, reason and logic do not seem to enter into this at all.
The biggest fear that has been articulated is that it is really being driven by ideology rather than by any good reason, any good logical business plan or expectation of savings. The real opportunities for savings within Revenue Canada will not come from the creation of some superagency. The real opportunity for revenue will come from having an adequate number of auditors to collect the taxes that are owing.
A group of auditors made representations to our caucus just a week ago pleading this very case. Billions of dollars of taxes are left uncollected each year because there simply are not enough auditors in the field doing the job and getting these revenues for the government to use. In other words, people are getting away with murder in terms of taxation because they are not being audited properly. Taxes are not being collected properly. This is the case which was made to us by senior auditors with Revenue Canada in their appeal to us to do everything we can to oppose Bill C-43.
The auditors expect that the situation will only get worse after the creation of the new superagency. The auditors feel, and I think quite justifiably, that the whole move toward a superagency is like a Trojan horse. They think it is wrapped up in a package which would be palatable to the public but in actual fact it contains a lot of surprises waiting to be sprung on us, not the least of which is a move toward further privatization of services.
The road toward ASD, alternative service delivery, superagencies, whatever we want to call it, is the road toward privatization and dismantling the public sector even in areas we know should be managed and controlled strictly through the public sector, like something as sensitive as the collection of our taxes. Other ASD examples have been absolutely disastrous for working people. They are always the last ones to be consulted.
I am thinking specifically of the privatization at Goose Bay. All the non-military personnel were laid off and services were contracted out to an out of country company, Serco, to provide the same services that Canadians used to provide in good unionized well paying jobs. These same people were hired back at half the wages and are now working for a foreign corporation to provide services on our military base. It is absolutely perverse when we think about it.
It is that kind of background and that sort of recent experience that has made Canadians apprehensive about Bill C-43 and the creation of this superagency.
It is not just the NDP and the labour groups that are directly impacted by this who are apprehensive about it. Yvon Cyrenne of Raymond Chabot Martin Paré said in the chartered accountant magazine of March 1998: “The creation of the customs and revenue agency would, for all intents and purposes, be an abdication of political power”. I would add that it would be an abdication of political responsibility in that it would be that much more removed from elected officials having any purview over this collection. It would be strictly in the hands of this freestanding, arm's length superagency.
About 5,000 employees of Revenue Canada work in Transcona and in Winnipeg. Many of them live in my riding and many worked on my campaign. Some of them were actually politicized for the first time in their lives because of what was about to happen to them. They were reaching out for some kind of political support from anybody who would articulate or voice their concerns. I am glad to have the opportunity to that today.
They have good reason to be apprehensive. Nobody really knows what this is going to end up looking like. Will it look like the Canada Post Corporation? Will it be a stand alone agency like Canada Post? I do not think so, although that comparison has been made. If it were, then the workers should fall under the Canada Labour Code, not the Public Service Staff Relations Act.
That in itself is a huge issue for the unionized workers who work for Revenue Canada. Where will the industrial relations be when all of the dust settles? Can anybody answer that? What is going to happen to their terms and conditions of employment? Are they still bargaining with the same employer? Is the employer that much different after they are removed from the public sector in that sense?
There are hundreds of questions that are left unanswered. Many were brought to our attention, as I said, when the employees of Revenue Canada came to our caucus just a week ago and articulated these fears. Representatives from the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the Union of Taxation Employees and one other labour group were justifiably apprehensive about this.
The term Trojan horse has been used. I have heard the term mega taxman. It does not matter what we want to call this new superagency, it is going to be something that Canadians will not recognize and will not be comfortable with. Will it look like the IRS in the United States, a boondoggle like the IRS that answers to nobody?
This is what we are saying. When we get that kind of independence, there is room for abuse. It is something that can grow out of control, beyond what it was initially designed for.
There seems to be a sense in the public sector, certainly within the federal government, of a belief in this right wing ideology that all things in the public sector are bad and all things privately run are good. There is a belief that some inherent streamlining comes into play when things go into the private sector, as if there is no waste in the private sector. This is an absolute myth.
It is a cruel myth in that this bashing of the public sector goes on. This atmosphere of contempt has been allowed to flourish across the country. Public sector employees are knocking themselves out to do their best, often with limited resources and limited compensation. Abuse is heaped on them. Every time there is a deficit or a cost overrun they say “Oh, it is that bloated public sector. If we could only shed some jobs out of the public sector”. There is this myth perpetrating that we can shrink our way to prosperity.
Even the private sector went through its decade of lean and mean, shedding employees and casting people off. Many of them now realize they have gone too far. They have cut all the fat and have cut into the flesh, the muscle tissue to where they cannot function any more.
That is what is happening to our military. This compulsion, this drive to cut, hack, slash and throw Canadians out into the street has left us with a human resources emergency in the military. The people who are being cut are the highly skilled, middle band of trained workers, the people who actually had administrative capacities, et cetera. We still have the foot soldiers, the grunts. We still have plenty of generals. It is that middle band of competent people who can actually do things which is disappearing. The restoration of funding overnight is not going to bring that middle band back. Those people are gone. They are gone to the point where the whole organization is at risk.
Similar streamlining efficiencies, if we want to call them that, are taking place every time we see this idea of offloading to alternative service delivery. That is really what the superagency is. It is ASD. It is getting the same job done in a different way.
We would argue it is a step backward in terms of service to the Canadian public. We are buying into an unknown commodity for one thing. The reservations brought to us by the UTE, the Union of Taxation Employees, are real, valid and justified concerns. They are vehemently opposed to this.
The government has failed to prove to anybody's satisfaction that this is a good thing to do. All we have heard is complaint after complaint that we are going into uncharted waters, that danger lurks in these uncharted waters. It will probably be the working people who will end up feeling the brunt of it.
The government should also be forewarned that we are going to lose valuable opportunities to collect revenues to the best of our ability. If we listen to the people at the front lines who really know what they are talking about, they say we need 500 more auditors in the field tomorrow, not cutbacks and reductions.