Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand today and support my colleague from Saskatchewan in this initiative.
The Liberals try to hide behind expressions like “this is not worded right” and “this could be done differently” and “how about these folks”. We agree. We are not master writers of legislation. That is what committees do. The one thing we know for sure is that the Liberal government and the bureaucrats at Revenue Canada got this wrong. We may not have it right but they got it wrong. They are continuing to reinforce that point in lawsuits and so on in trying to collect these fees from amateur sports groups.
Nothing gives one a stronger foundation in life than team sports. It has been said by every member who has spoken to this issue that team sports are a boon to Canadian society. We have let a lot of that slip. We have to reinvigorate it. Yet Revenue Canada is chasing down kids and the amateur sports teams. Amateur sports teams are the community backbone in a lot of cases and the CRA is chasing them down and fining them, and then taking them to court to try and collect.
It is only in Saskatchewan. No other province has been assessed $100,000. That is the amount I am talking about for 12 teams in Saskatchewan. I am sure the federal government has spent more money than that on lawyers in trying to collect this money.
This is not about fairness or initiative or anything. Those guys just do not get it that every once in a while they have to admit that they made a mistake and back up.
We saw that in spades with the little town of Wilkie in my riding. Revenue Canada assessed it retroactively for not charging amateur sports clubs and figure skating groups the GST on ice rent. Revenue Canada said that if Wilkie and the recreation community leased the ice to each individual hockey player, and these kids are amateurs, and each individual figure skater, there would be no GST charged. However if the ice was leased to a group, GST had to be charged. That is the opposite to buying doughnuts. We pay GST if we buy one doughnut, but we do not when we buy six. Revenue Canada got it backwards.
The crazy part of this whole thing was that the community of Wilkie paid the bill. It sent in $7,000. It did not know it could fight this charge.
I happened to be at a function in Wilkie and somebody mentioned that this had happened and thought it was ridiculous. I said, “You bet your sweet bippy it is”. I got on the phone to Revenue Canada the next day and spoke to the person in charge of this audit. I asked, “Who sent you out to do this audit? Where did this direction come from? I want to talk to that person, and when I am in government I want to fire that person”.
I was sent up the food chain and I found the person who had sent the auditor out. I asked her to send me the paragraphs in the tax code that authorized that. She said she was not sure she could get her hands on them. I told her she had better because I wanted to see them. A little over a day later I received them by fax. Right in the tax code it said there was an exemption if it was for amateur sports and figure skating. Exemption means it is not collected and it is not charged. Revenue Canada was going against what is in the code.
I phoned her back and said that the code indicated an exemption. It did not say to go for the jugular. I told her the code was being read wrong or maybe it had been translated wrong or something. We fought back and forth but lo and behold a week later the money was sent back to Wilkie with an “Oh, sorry”.
How many other communities have been nailed and do not realize that this is ridiculous? The community of Wilkie thinks I am a hero now which is great. Revenue Canada has a tainted name out there to begin with and it keeps compounding it with these stupid initiatives, going after amateur hockey players.
I have two teams in my riding and this is killing them. They raise their money with bottle drives and bake sales and whatever else the parents can put together. A lot of these kids are away from home and need to be billeted. As was said before, it costs money to feed these kids. I raised a young hockey player and he could eat his weight on a weekly basis. The $300 or whatever one gets does not even come close to that amount.
In its exuberance Revenue Canada has said that is income and somebody has to pay EI and CPP on it. What a ridiculous supposition. None of these kids can afford that type of thing. None of their parents can afford that type of thing. None of the teams can afford it. However, Revenue Canada is sending lawyers after these folks, but only in Saskatchewan.
That cost the Liberals in the last election. We are down to one Liberal minister in Saskatchewan. What has that Liberal minister, who is now the finance minister, done about this? ET call home. We have not heard from him. We have written him letters saying that he is the lead minister, that he is now the guy with the purse strings and that he should fix it. He has not even begun to address it. He is ignoring it.
The devil is in the details in situations like this. These are the types of things that rev people up. It is not the billion dollar boondoggle at HRDC or approaching $2 billion for the gun registry, which make some people mad. This makes everybody mad. They are picking on our kids. That is not even fair.
The Hon. Eleanor Caplan, who was the minister at that time, responded to Mr. Roy Bailey. I would be wrong if I did not say what a great job Roy did on this. He put his heart and soul in it. He deserves the respect of every hockey player across Canada, not just the kids in Saskatchewan. In a response to Roy, the Hon. Eleanor Caplan said, “The Revenue Agency is to administer the Income Tax Act in Canada fairly so that it applies equally to all Canadians”.
The last time I checked, all Canadians do not live in Saskatchewan. We are kind of scattered out across this hunk of ground. It did not apply to anybody else other than Saskatchewan, so there goes the fairness thing out the window. There is a fairness initiative in Revenue Canada that should apply, but it does not because those guys do not want to look at it.
Even Don Cherry became involved in this. When he heard about it, like Don does, he gave the most scathing attack on Revenue Canada. It probably has him pinned to the wall somewhere, but Don does not back down, and thank God for that. This is ridiculous.
Whether we have the wording in the bill right, who the hell cares? The whole point is that this has to see the light of day. The finance minister from Saskatchewan is running and hiding. He will not bring it forward. The government will not bring it forward. Revenue Canada will not apologize. Somebody has to push back. That is what we are doing here tonight. We are giving them a shove.
One of the Liberal members said that this was totally unfair to other Canadians. Other Canadians have not found themselves in the crosshairs of Revenue Canada. It will happen. These revenue guys are cash hungry. They have to pay for all the money that oozes out under sponsorship scandals and goes back to the Liberal Party. They have to find it somewhere, and that is what they are doing.
The Liberals wasted $150 million in the sponsorship fiasco. Here they are clawing back $100,000, chump change. It will cost them probably three or four times that to collect it. Shame on them. Stand up and vote for this bill when it comes before us. If they have any kind of backbone, that is what it will take.
There is a glaring problem. They cannot run, they cannot hide. They have to fix it. It will not take a lot to do it. Reword it, rewrite it, I do not care, but get off of these young kids. By doing nothing, they are part of the problem.
Mr. Bailey asked question after question and made statements on it. I have copies of them here. A point Roy made one day was that the Minister of Revenue kept saying that they were looking at it and that they were going to check it out. That was maybe what led to it taking almost two years to get this on the floor, other than private members' bills which are hit and miss at best. We kept thinking this was such a glaring error that nobody could walk away and not fix this, but she did.
The next person who looked after Revenue Canada did. We called them all. Nobody responded. We finally contacted the member for Wascana, the finance minister, who has the purse strings--