Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-11, the whistleblower protection.
I speak with some trepidation on the bill. I have not been here quite as long as Mr. Speaker. However, some of the stories I have heard over the last eight years about the abuses in some departments leaves something to be desired. I will get into some specific examples of the culture that has permeated within the Liberal Party, which is quite shocking and appalling.
Before I do that, I would like to acknowledge the Conservative member for Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry. He took a bill which we could not support and, through a lot of hard work, he managed to get enough amendments so there will be some meaningful aspects to the whistleblower protection.
In its first form from the Liberal government, the whistleblower's report would go to cabinet or the minister. Now it comes to Parliament. There have been some meaningful amendments that will allow us to at least support it and send it off to committee.
Again, I do this with a certain amount of skepticism. I will explain why. I will give an example which is not exactly about whistleblower protection, but it has all the elements of what that party has created.
I have been working on a file in my riding for a number of years. It is called the JDS tax file. This situation is where hundreds of employees were wrongfully taxed on a phantom income of which they never saw one thin dime. It has been in the media and the news nationally. For a long time it has been in the local news.
It was incomprehensible. Some of these people were facing tax bills of $200,000 or $300,000 on what I call a phantom income. These people never saw this income, yet Revenue Canada was aggressively pursuing them. They were desperate. They came to see me. We took up their cause and we worked on this for a number of years. This goes back to when the current Prime Minister was then the minister of finance. We had numerous meetings with him as the minister of finance and some of his staff members, such as Karl Littler. We were close to a solution.
All this time these people were hanging on to a glimmer of hope, a thread that this could possibly be solved and they would not be put into financial ruin.
As the story unfolded, we had lots of promises and empty rhetoric, but then we got into the last election. During the last election some of these people had an opportunity to speak directly to the Prime Minister, one on one with cameras rolling. This is all a matter of public record. The Prime Minister was fully aware of the file because he had met with me on at least two or three occasions. He knew that they were tax people. He said that they would fix it, that he had told Ralph to take care of it. They got passed off from one minister to another minister. It was a very frustrating time for these people. I will get to the element of the whistleblower protection.
I shake my head in disbelief that the government would do this. I have to question its sincerity and genuineness in this.
Numerous promises to fix this situation are on the public record. There were numerous meetings with other members of Parliament. The member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca apparently became involved. Privately and on the radio he told these people that he had an agreement in place, that a deal had been struck and that their problems were solved. Then all that fell apart, and these families face financial ruin.
To add insult to injury, one family in particular, the Woods family, has been very vocal. They have been in the media. They have been telling their story. They are not being partisan. They are not on one political side or the other. They are telling their story about how they have been treated by Revenue Canada and how no one on the government has listened to their concerns.
They were frustrated beyond our wildest imaginations. Everything they worked for was on the line. This went on for three or four years. The government kept dangling carrots in front of them that it was going to resolve the matter, that a solution was imminent. We heard language from the Prime Minister's staff that they had advised Revenue Canada to cut the motor on these files. The member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca would tell them that a deal had been struck that they would only be paying pennies on the dollar. This file has been going on for three or four years. What did the government have the gall to do?
The family that spoke up, the family that was in the media trying to get the public's attention, the Liberal government punished them the harshest. The ones who were silent and were not out in the media—I do not think were treated fairly at all; they should never have been paying taxes in the first place—did not have to pay the back interest. Some of them paid 80¢ on the dollar, some paid 60¢ on the dollar, but all of the ones who never spoke up virtually did not have to pay the full amount. The families that spoke out, the whistleblowers, the families that went public, the government berated them and charged them back interest.