Madam Speaker, on March 10 in this House I asked a question to deal with the 850 fishers of Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec who have been taxed unfairly on the buyout of their fishing licences. They voluntarily participated in a program offered by the federal government in 1998. With the collapse of the ground fishery there was an opportunity for them to actually get out of the fishery and several hundred of them took advantage of this program.
What has transpired since is nothing short of a shame on the government because of the way these fishers have been treated. They knew they would have to pay capital gains tax on the buyout of their licences. That is not the issue. The issue is that for some of those fishers they were actually charged 25% tax on the capital gains while the other 850 were charged 100% tax on their capital gains. So the question is, why were they treated differently?
What they have been trying to do ever since is to get the government to acknowledge that there was an error made and the error was made when Revenue Canada informed the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that these fishers would indeed be taxed at 100% of their capital gains. Later it was learned that was not the case. DFO had only passed along the information that had been provided to it by Revenue Canada.
Upon learning that some of their colleagues, some of their fellow fishers, were in fact only taxed 25% on the capital gains, then of course these fishers came looking for money that was owed to them, money that had been collected by the government in this situation unfairly.
We have been trying for all of this time, going on 10 years now, to get the government to acknowledge that this is a mistake. It is a mistake it can fix quite easily if it wants to. We all know that governments can do things when they realize an egregious error has been made and in this case that is certainly what has happened. So we are trying again to make the government understand the situation.
It would appear from a response that I received to a petition that I presented on the very same issue, that somehow Revenue Canada seems to think that these fishers do not want to pay capital gains on the buyout of their licences and that is not the case.
It says in the response from TCC that the payments were taxable under the provisions of the act. They are not quarrelling with that. Of course they expect to pay tax. That is not the question. The issue is that they have been taxed unfairly. How anyone could look at the situation and not see that about 200 fishers were taxed 25% on the sale of their fishing licences and the remaining 850 were taxed at 100%. There is a problem here; an error was made.
We are asking the government to acknowledge this error, and forget the fact that it is before the courts because that is always used as an excuse of course when people do not want to deal with an issue, and in this case the government. It is a smokescreen. We are asking it to acknowledge there has been a mistake made and let us fix this once and for all and treat the fishers fairly like they are being asked of their government.