Mr. Speaker, since the Liberal government came to power in 1993, it has been overtaxing employers and employees through the employment insurance fund. In other words the premiums that employers and employees pay into the fund have exceeded, every year the Liberal government has been in power, the amount of money that the fund actually needed to operate. It has exceeded it to the tune of between $5 billion and $8 billion a year so that collectively over the years the Liberal government has been in power, employers and employees have overcontributed $39 billion to the EI fund.
However, that money is not in the EI fund. That money has been diverted to the federal government's consolidated revenue fund. It has been spent on wasteful programs such as bilingualism, the firearms registry and $8 billion a year in handouts through the Indian affairs department, to name a few examples.
That is an issue in and of itself, but on February 20, I brought up another issue with respect to employment insurance premiums. When a person leaves employment partway through the year and starts a new job, that person and the new employer begin contributing to the employment insurance fund through their premiums all over again. In many instances a worker in the course of a year actually exceeds the EI contribution limit.
Employees at the end of the year on their taxes get the overpayment back, but the employers who collectively overpaid do not get their money back. That amount is $750 million a year.
The federal government has been using excessive EI premiums to overtax employees and employers under the guise of employment insurance but is really diverting the money to the consolidated revenue fund. What it is doing here is a similar taxation by stealth. Most employers are not even aware that they are being overtaxed. How would they know whether or not an employee they had employed for a few months at the beginning of a fiscal year who had left that employment had overcontributed?
My point to the finance minister on February 20 was why did he in the recent budget not eliminate this taxation by stealth, this unfair tax grab that rips off employers? In many cases they are not even aware that it is taking place. The minister's response was that it would be difficult to contemplate what kind of system could be put in place to do this. If Canada Customs and Revenue Agency already knows how much the employee has overpaid, it is a simple matter to calculate how much the employer has overpaid.
That $750 million is coming out of the pockets of business owners in Canada. It is the latest billion dollar boondoggle by the Liberal government and the finance minister. They are wasting money on questionable program spending but refuse to give back what clearly does not belong to them. The Liberals are picking the pockets of business owners who deserve to get their overpayment back so that it can be used for job creation and economic growth, the backbone of our economy.
The $750 million annual overpayment rightfully belongs to the business owners that paid it. They deserve to get it back in the same manner as their employees do. The finance minister should do the right thing and put an immediate end to the federal government's shameless cash grab of payroll deduction overpayments.