Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to Motions Nos. 1 and 2 which would effectively delete clauses 35 and 36 in Bill C-32.
The Canadian Alliance is bringing these two motions forward because we are concerned that in approving this, we would simply be handing the government and the people at Revenue Canada another weapon to go out and wring ever more tax dollars out of taxpayers' pockets.
The government is not very efficient at many things. One thing it is exceedingly efficient at and becoming more efficient at every day is using the hammer of Revenue Canada to go out and collect money from people's pockets. These two clauses grant the Minister of National Revenue the power to obtain judicial authorization to assess and collect GST and HST deemed remittable. We argue that it already has sufficient tools to do this.
I know the government will say that it needs symmetry between what there is now in the Income Tax Act and the Excise Tax Act. We agree, but it should be the other way. We think we should be reducing the tools the government has to intrude on people's lives.
I can barely think of a time when there was not someone in my office complaining about unfair treatment from people in the GST department or at Revenue Canada.
Certainly starting in 1995, the year we saw the government bring in an important budget, one of the things it did was to hire more auditors. It hired tons of auditors. I cannot prove this, but anecdotally I think we all know it is so, that starting at that point Revenue Canada and the GST folks got a lot more aggressive. Those auditors are trying to justify their existence.
I cannot count the complaints that have come into my office where people have said that they went to the GST people to ask for a ruling on such and such and they were given a ruling. They submitted their papers. They did it the way they were told to. All of a sudden they found out that they did it wrong. They did it the way the GST people said to do it, but they did it wrong. Someone else at the other end interpreted the whole thing completely differently. Then all of a sudden the GST auditors would descend like locusts, go through the people's books and tie up their businesses sometimes for days on end. In the meantime, people were struggling to keep their businesses afloat. They found that in some cases their accounts had been frozen. All kinds of things occurred that made it impossible for them to do business.
The very last thing we should be doing in this place is to hand more ammunition to the people at Revenue Canada and the people in the GST department. That is the last thing we need to do. That is effectively what these two clauses in Bill C-32 do. We do not want that anymore. We do not want to see that happen.
We do not have a problem in Canada with people paying their fair share of taxes. We have a problem with the government wringing too much money out of people's pockets. We have an Income Tax Act which is 2,000 pages thick and extraordinarily complex GST legislation and all the amendments and circulars that flow from it. With all of that there are a lot of grey areas. People inevitably end up in those grey areas, sometimes unavoidably. When the government produces legislation as complex as this, it ends up causing situations the consequences of which it cannot see.
People who are trying to earn a living fill out all the GST forms they have to fill out every month, and lo and behold, inevitably some of them wander into those grey areas. What happens when that occurs? The GST people come down not only like a swarm of locusts, but with a hammer. Very often people are in a position where they feel they are on the right side of the issue and that the law is with them. Their accountants will tell them that they are on the right side and according to their understanding these people are within the spirit of the law. But they end up fighting the folks at GST and guess who can outlast whom in a situation like that.
Someone who owns a cornerstore or whatever may have a few thousand dollars to fight a legal battle. But on the other side is the Government of Canada with its battalions of lawyers and experts of all kinds and all the resources the government has including deep, deep pockets with all kinds of money. The government basically freezes people out or makes it impossible for them to proceed. As a result, although these people are very often on the right side of the issue, they cave in. They have to cave in because they cannot afford to wage the battle. The government knows this, so it always comes out on top.
It means more revenue for the government, more revenue coming in all the time. We see it when we look at the GST revenues. They have gone through the roof since 1993. They have gone absolutely through the roof.
The government will say it is economic growth. I will concede that some of it is economic growth, but I think my friends across the way have to concede that some of it, a not insubstantial chunk of it, is due to this new unrealistically tough attitude at the GST office. They are crawling all over businesses trying to wring every cent out of hardworking business people across the country.
I do not think the members across the way in an honest moment will deny that they have had probably dozens of cases each in their offices where people have said, “Here is my correspondence. Here is what was sent to me saying I could do it this way or that way”, and then they got pounded. Someone on the other end did not have the same message.
I do not know how many times people have said to me that they phoned the GST office and got an interpretation of what they were supposed to do from someone who very often does not have a last name; it is Mary or Bill or whomever. Getting the last name from someone on the other end of a government telephone line is like pulling hen's teeth; it is virtually impossible. Then finally at the day of reckoning when they try to explain to the GST people why their paperwork is not done right, they say that Bill or Mary told them to do it. The GST office asks for the person's last name and they say, “Well, I do not know. They would not give me their last name”. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard that story, I would be a wealthy, wealthy man.
My point is that it is crazy to arm the government, which already has all those tools, with even more tools to wring more money out of people's pockets.
I want symmetry too. I want symmetry between the Income Tax Act and what we are seeing in the GST, but I want it in a different way. I want fewer powers for Revenue Canada. I do not want it to have the ability to turn people's homes upside down like it currently does.
There are many examples. Probably one of the most egregious ones is in my part of the world, in southern Alberta. A woman finally took her own life because of the harassment from the tax people. This is quite a famous story now, unfortunately. It is part of a trend.
Let us not empower the people in the government to go even further than they already go. Life is miserable enough for a lot of people because of the intrusive behaviour of people who collect taxes. We do not need to give them more tools. They already have all of the resources on their side.
I am proud to say that in the Canadian Alliance my colleagues have moved things like the taxpayers protection act, which would give real rights to people who are facing this sort of outrageous behaviour from the people at Revenue Canada. It would reverse the onus so that Revenue Canada would have to prove that it was in the wrong, instead of putting this chill over things by threatening all kinds of legal action and threatening to drag it through the courts.
People on this side of the aisle, members of the Canadian Alliance, understand the sort of difficulties business people have to go through when they deal with the folks at Revenue Canada, the GST office, the income tax folks, or whomever.
I urge my colleagues across the way to support the motions to get rid of clauses 35 and 36. If they do, they will be sending a powerful and a very good message to taxpayers across Canada.