Mr. Speaker, it is nice to have you in the chair again. It seems to becoming habitual that you happen to be on shift just at the time I am giving my speeches. It is nice to have you trapped there. Even if the House is empty you are forced to listen to my speech, so I thank you very much for that.
I will be splitting my time with the member for New Westminister—Coquitlam—Burnaby.
The member who just spoke mentioned the new millennium. It made me think of the fact that the new millennium actually starts at the end of the year 2000, that is December 31, 2000, not at the end of 1999 when the government will waste huge amounts of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, on meaningless millennium celebrations. It is typical of the government to be totally out of touch with reality.
The Swiss apparently are not going to celebrate the change of the millennium until the correct time which is the end of 2000, typical Swiss punctuality. They make good watches so they know how to measure time.
Somebody asked me what New Zealanders are doing and I am not really sure. I could get myself into trouble with that.
One other thing I wanted to mention in relation to this before getting into the meat of Bill C-43 is that the government has moved time allocation on every stage of the bill. This is the government that when it was in opposition screamed like crazy every time the Mulroney government moved closure or time allocation. When we look at its record in the 35th parliament it moved time allocation 32 times and closure times. In this parliament, just less than a year, it has moved time allocation 10 times.
The total since it took office in 1993-94 is time allocation 42 times and closure 3 times. I can see the government is shocked at that.
I know when it was in opposition it was shocked at Mulroney for doing it at about half that rate. This government is actually worse than the one that preceded it.
It seems any discussion about this bill, an act to establish the Canada customs and revenue agency, must of necessity involve the detailed consideration of the need for accountability and for transparency of operations in such a new agency.
Plenty of Canadians consider the existing Revenue Canada to be less than appropriately accountable. It is important that we address their concerns when we are considering this whole application of Bill C-43.
To illustrate the point, how many members have actually tried to call Revenue Canada to ask about a tax problem, but not as members of parliament? Members have have secret telephone numbers that are not published and we can get through directly to real people.
I hope they have tried to do that because it is an incredibly frustrating and upsetting experience. Not only is it rare to reach a real person by telephone but when someone does, it is virtually impossible to get the name of the person.
If the person ever has to call back, my goodness, it is almost guaranteed that they will get someone completely different and they will have to explain the entire problem all over again.
If someone tries to make a personal visit to the place from which emanate these notices of taxes due or the ones that contain all sorts of errors that we are constantly trying to fix, they would be in for a surprise.
Many of those offices do not actually seem to have real people there. Some tax offices whose addresses are shown on the envelopes that we receive in the mail from these places do not even have a public reception area.
A visitor to the building gets the distinct impression the employees sneak in the back door so that they can avoid recognition. Even for MPs, though, with this special and privileged access through these unpublished numbers, it is not always easy to get answers or to get action.
There is a great and pressing need for a better level of service along with the greater efficiency that would flow from allowing taxpayers to at least speak to the same person each time they call. This alone would surely invoke enormous efficiencies and I hope the government would consider that.
Imagine not having to explain one's tax problem story all over again to a different person every time they call Revenue Canada. What a pleasure it would be to be given the name and direct contact number for a Revenue Canada employee who looks after a certain set of accounts. Problems surely could be dealt with more efficiently if that sort of system were in place.
The well documented experience with the existing agency demands of us that we build into Bill C-43 some accountability. Some sort of taxpayer bill of rights is a great idea. I know my colleagues have mentioned this in their speeches as well as establishing an independent ombudsman type of office for taxpayer protection.
Such an office would have the right to demand accountability and would obviously have access to all the files in the new agency. It would have to be directly accountable to parliament, something that must happen with the new Revenue Canada agency anyway.
We cannot allow a government created agency that touches on the lives of each and every taxpayer or potential taxpayer to operate without direct accountability to parliament and to the members of parliament. It is simply not good enough to establish accountability to the minister. There must be a greater amount of transparency and accountability than simply to the minister.
The present agency and the proposed new one would come in for far less criticism and attack if this government would take steps to reduce the taxes presently collected from citizens.
People are so financially stressed by the tax load imposed on them that they are going into the underground economy. Some small businesses are not able to pay their instalments and people are getting into difficulties with Revenue Canada simply because they are overtaxed.
They are taking on more and more of a personal debt load as a result of that income shortfall and the ministers of taxation, the Minister of Finance and the Minister of National Revenue, live high on the hog as multimillionaires as we know.
What do they know of the pressures being felt by the small business operators and the average wage earners across the country? I would say little or nothing. As we know, they live in a dream world of parliamentary receptions, state dinners, holiday residences in the country and international travel.
Perhaps like the Prime Minister they get their advice from imaginary homeless people. There is no doubt, though, that they are hopelessly out of touch with the real world of the average wage earner.
It reminds me of the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development who is out in B.C. at the moment travelling around trying to promote the Nisga'a treaty even though 40% of the Nisga'a themselves rejected it. Nobody has asked why 40%, almost half, of the Nisga'a rejected this treaty. Maybe the government and the minister should do that but they do not want to listen.
It is just like this bill. The government will not listen to input that comes from the average person. Eighty per cent of B.C. residents have expressed displeasure with the treaty and all they hear from this government is that they have a racist attitude when it is in fact genuine concern.
The minister lives in a dream world of political correctness. She applauds Nelson Mandela but here she is trying to set up an identical sort of apartheid like system in B.C. with these types of treaties where we could have as many as 50 different governments in B.C. each with its own set of laws and no protection whatsoever for the rank and file members on the reserves to have the money and benefits flow to them.
We have so many bands in B.C. that are not democratically structured where there are high ranking chiefs in place who are taking all the benefits and flowthrough that come from these types of treaties.
I have a Squamish band in my riding. In the last week alone five different band members have called, urging me to vote against Bill C-49 they are afraid that all the benefits will flow to the chiefs. On the Squamish band reserve in North Vancouver there are 16 different chiefs. It is all hierarchal with no democracy in place.
It is not just for this bill but for all the measures this government is looking at, it really needs to get a little more down to the grassroots and start listening to the average person and the input that comes from them.
Unfortunately, because we are running out of time, I cannot go through all this other wonderful stuff that I have down here which I know would amuse some of the members opposite, but I will try to get another chance to get up later in questions and comments.
I finish by urging the government side to listen to the input that has come from my colleagues on this side regarding a taxpayer bill of rights. There is really a good logical reason to have at least a set of principles by which the new agency should act.