Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to address the bill put before the House today by the hon. member for Souris—Moose Mountain.
Private Members' Business is one of the most genuinely democratic functions in this House because it allows us to represent our constituents without partisan constraints.
I appreciate what the hon. member is trying to accomplish with Bill C-310. He is a colleague of mine on the Standing Committee on Transport. He did good work on that committee so I was surprised when I read this bill to find that it has rather obvious oversights and mistakes.
It appears that when the hon. member was drafting the bill he had a rare lapse in judgment. I wonder if he took some advice for the bill from some of his Reform Party colleagues. That would explain how the flaws came about. In any case, having carefully considered the bill before us I cannot support it.
As members of the House, one of our most important responsibilities is to ensure that the government serves the people of Canada effectively. To that end we must make sure that government is not bogged down in administrative and bureaucratic red tape. Reform has pushed this issue on numerous occasions.
Make no mistake, Madam Speaker. I greatly value the work that our public servants do for the country, but we must always make sure that the work we give them advances the public interest. Creating unnecessary red tape is an unproductive waste of society's resources. That is what this bill would do. It would create unnecessary red tape.
The bill would require every charity receiving federal funds to file an annual report to Parliament to show how these funds were used. In principle that sounds fine and dandy but think of the cost of implementing such a scheme.
First, the charities themselves would have to devote more of their resources to accounting for where every penny of their federal funding goes. This might be possible for larger charities like the United Way, but what of the smaller ones? Many charities, including many food banks, are run by just a few dedicated volunteers. And in these days in Canada under this government we have needed more and more food banks.
These people give so much of themselves already. Many have to fill out reams of forms just to apply for a little federal funding to keep them afloat. It is hardly fair to expect them to fill out even more forms.
Regardless the size of the charity, whether it is the United Way or the local priest who hands out winter boots to underprivileged children, all this time and energy spent doing even more paperwork for the government would be better spent carrying out their charitable work.
Not only would this bill be an unnecessary drain on charities, it would be an unnecessary drain on the government itself. Think of the bureaucracy it would take to process the reports. Knowing the current Liberal government, the funding for this bureaucracy would come from existing budgets. Public servants, many of whom are still waiting for the pay equity they are entitled to by law, have been denied by 14 years of government stalling tactics. They would have to add this new paperwork to their workload. This would mean fewer resources devoted to health care, fewer resources devoted to getting EI cheques out on time, just to process these redundant charity funding reports.
I say these reports are redundant because the various government departments and agencies that dole out the grants and loans already serve the function of holding them accountable. If they do not see results, they can simply discontinue funding. Since this mechanism is already in place to make sure public funds are not wasted, the extra expenditures called for in this bill are unnecessary.
As if this bill did not waste enough resources, it would then require each report to be tabled in the House of Commons. I cannot even fathom a guess as to why the hon. member for Souris—Moose Mountain included this in the bill. Why would he not just have the Treasury Board publish and release the reports? Why bog down the House by tabling financial reports when it should be debating issues that matter to Canadians? It makes no sense.
Another thing that I question about this bill is its name. I know the naming of a bill is not important in how the bill functions. For instance, 20 years ago the government passed a bill called the Canadian Human Rights Act. One would think that an act with such a name would guarantee Canadians their fundamental human rights. But this has not prevented the current Liberal government from trampling on the human rights of Canadians by brutally cracking down on a peaceful democratic protest at the APEC summit, or by denying female public servants equal pay for work of equal value. So clearly the name of a bill has little relevance.
Nevertheless the name of a bill can offer insight into what its writer is thinking. I wonder what was going through the mind of the hon. member when he called this bill before us the Special Interest Groups Funding Accountability Act.
Clause 2 of this bill specifies that it only applies to groups or individuals who receive public funds for charitable purposes. From this I can only conclude that the hon. member considers charities to be special interest groups. He does not seem to understand what a special interest group is: a group that works to further its own interests.
Charities on the other hand do not fit that definition. Instead of serving themselves, they exist to serve others. They provide countless valuable services to society from meals on wheels for shut-ins to emotional support for cancer victims and their families.
I for one have experienced some of the things the member talks about. After the last federal campaign there was a rumour that the Reform candidate had received some funding from a group that was receiving government funding. But I am not willing to sell out the work that the charities do for the sake of one person or one organization that may not be doing things accordingly.
I would like to conclude by thanking the hon. member for bringing this bill before us today. Although the bill is flawed and redundant I appreciate and agree with his sentiments that there should be greater accountability for the spending of public funds. However, it is not the charities that need to be watched more closely, it is real special interest groups like corporations.
Today corporations receive billions in tax breaks and subsidies from the Government of Canada, yet there is no mechanism for holding them accountable for how these funds are used. Many corporations take this money but lay off hundreds of thousands of Canadians.
I urge members of the House to closely examine the tax breaks and subsidies government gives to corporations. Let us not be fooled into believing that all corporate tax breaks and subsidies are good or that they are detrimental. Some are undoubtedly used in ways to stimulate the economy while others waste monies that could go toward health care or tax relief for Canadian families.
We need to identify corporate tax breaks and subsidies that advance the public interests and do away with the ones that do not.