Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to Bill C-43, an act to establish the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.
I will begin my remarks by saying that the government's insistence on creating the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency against everyone's advice, starting with the vast majority of provincial governments, including the Government of Quebec, gives the impression that certain Liberal ministers are suffering from what I would call “acute neroitis”.
This disease is named after the infamous Roman emperor Nero who, as members will remember, played music while watching Rome being devastated by raging fires that were set at his own command.
At times, I even wonder if this Liberal government does not have among its members firebugs of such talent that even the former Roman emperor would be red with envy. One has to be a real hot head to insist so doggedly on setting up an agency that will result in a 20% reduction of the Canadian public service as soon as it comes into being.
Under the guise of modernizing the state, our Liberal Neros are establishing a new structure which will translate overnight into a 20% cut of our public service.
For the sake of what interests is the government taking steps it knows full well are meant to take apart the government apparatus? Where is the public interest when, in this era of electronic communications, the government is getting ready to transfer to a private agency an incredible amount of personal and financial information on our fellow citizens in Quebec and Canada?
I must admit this government worries me. It worries me a lot. Its policies worry me because sometimes they seem to come from nowhere, as is the case with this Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. Or rather, and this is even less reassuring, it would appear the government is taking orders from some interests unknown to you and I, that would rather remain behind the scenes and are in any case contrary to the best interests of the Canadian population as a whole.
I cannot for the life of me understand why the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency is such a priority for the government at this point in time when there are more urgent issues we should be dealing with. If only this government's ministers would leave their ivory tower to go and see what goes on in the real world they would realize that, as we speak, a real social crisis is ripping the country apart, leaving behind an increasing number of unemployed workers, something which unfortunately does not seem to matter for this government.
Government members should feel ashamed to expand so much energy today on debating the creation of a new structure nobody wants when so many of our fellow citizens do not even know where their next meal, and their children's, is coming from or whether they will have a place to sleep tonight.
I will be blunt: this government should be ashamed of talking about creating a new private agency that 40,000 Revenue Canada employees will have to rely on for their jobs. These are fathers and mothers who, in two years, could very well see their salary reduced, their working conditions changed for the worse or their job simply disappear without being able to do anything about it. It is as though the government were set on imposing economic uncertainty on the largest possible number of our fellow citizens.
It is the same government that cut transfers to the provinces, transfers aimed at helping students, social welfare recipients and the sick.
It is not surprising that Jean Chrétien's Canada is a country where injustice and inequity are commonplace, a country where the worst thing that can happen to someone is to lose one's job or to be poor and unemployed, because this country is run by a government that does not care about its weakest and most vulnerable citizens.
The worst threat facing the people of this country does not come from the nasty separatists who were elected in Quebec and who create political and economic uncertainty. No. The threat does not come from this side.
For thousands and thousands of Canadians, the enemy is not in Quebec City but rather in the federal capital, in Ottawa. The enemy is this Liberal government, whose employment insurance reform has reduced the rate of contributors eligible for benefits from 80% to a mere 42%. Thousands of our fellow citizens who had paid EI premiums lost the right to receive benefits when they needed it and were forced onto the welfare rolls and into poverty by this government.
As if that were not enough, after denying access to EI benefits to thousands of our fellow citizens, thereby generating a surplus of billions of dollars in the EI fund, this government is now contemplating the robbery of the century and is trying to get its hands on this surplus and use it for its own ends.
Despite what some ministers across the way might say, thousands of our fellow citizens are convinced that the worst threat to our country does not come from the PQ government in Quebec, but rather from the federal Liberal government.
Just last Saturday evening, I attended a function where I met around 150 senior citizens from my riding. These people unanimously told me that they are outraged and deeply offended to see that, while poverty is rampant in this country, the only concern of the government is not to save the poor. That would be too much to ask of them. Its only concern is, believe it or not, to save the millionaires in Canadian professional sport.
As far as I know, none of these sports millionaires are wondering how they will manage to put food on the table for their families. I can assure the House that the privileged few who feed off the system do not have these kinds of worries. Still, the government has decided to help them out, to save them. But to save them from what? Is it not normal for people who earn millions of dollars to pay taxes accordingly?
The Liberal government does not seem to think so, because it is about to reduce by hundreds of millions of dollars the taxes paid by these poor sports millionaires. The government wants to fund these measures at the expense of the real poor from the middle class, in part by drawing billions of dollars from the EI surplus that belongs to them.
Would someone please explain to the leader of this government and to his ministers that millionaires are not poor? There is a limit to being out of touch with the reality of those who elected them and whom they wooed by promising to represent them well and defend their interests, only to forget everything the day after the election. I think it is high time the Prime Minister start listening again to what ordinary people have to say.
I urge him to visit seniors in my riding of Jonquière and listen to what they think of his plans to help professional sports tycoons, while at the same time dropping 40,000 loyal government employees, including 1,000 or so in the Jonquière tax centre, employees with whose services the government is about to dispense by shifting them to a private agency that will not be obligated to them in any way two years from now.
Before rushing to the rescue of professional sports tycoons, this government must scrap Bill C-43 and reassure the 40,000 affected employees that they no longer have to fear for their future. If it fails to do so, it will mean that the government has a hidden agenda, which is completely different from the one it sold Quebeckers and Canadians in the last election campaign.
In the 1997 election campaign, the government never told Revenue Canada employees that, as a reward, 40,000 of them would fall into the clutches of a bureaucratic structure. The government never said that, and therefore had no mandate to do so.
This government never told Quebeckers and Canadians that, if they voted for it in 1997, it would set about dismantling Canada a little at a time, and yet this is what it is doing by privatizing 20% of the federal public service. This government never said so openly and therefore was never mandated to do this.
I repeat, this government has no mandate to do this. If the Liberal government still understands the meaning of the word democracy, it has only one option open, that of abandoning the establishment of the Canada customs and revenue agency. I realize it is not an easy decision.
It is not easy, because I suspect that the Liberals have probably already promised some of their friends in the private sector, no doubt themselves poor millionaires too, that the new structure would benefit them. Today, however, they have to turn to their friends and say they cannot keep their word.
They cannot keep their word because they had already given their word to the people of Quebec and Canada that they would act in their interest. The Canada customs and revenue agency is not in their interest. They cannot keep their word because they had already given their word during the election campaign to the officials of the department of revenue, including those in my riding, that they need not worry about their jobs under a Liberal government.
If the government of Jean Chrétien has any honour left, it must keep the promise it gave to the people of Quebec and Canada and kill its proposed Canada customs and revenue agency.