Mr. Speaker, as this is my first time rising in the House in 2013, I would like to take a minute to wish my constituents a happy and prosperous New Year.
I am glad to speak to Bill C-48 today, a bill that has been a long time coming. I hope it will not be another decade before we undergo this exercise again.
As we have heard, this is a huge bill. It addresses the changes to the Income Tax Act, the Excise Tax Act, the Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, the First Nations Goods and Services Tax Act and related legislation. It is almost a thousand pages.
What sets this large piece of legislation apart from the omnibus budget implementation acts that we debated last year is that it makes changes to a few closely related pieces of legislation. Therefore, I am perplexed as to why the government did not just throw it all in with the other stuff.
As we heard today, these changes are mostly old news and have been in practice for a number of years. That said, the bill is needed, as it has been more than 10 years since we have updated tax code legislation.
It is not that there have not been changes. The bill will include hundreds of tax measures that are already in place and have been enacted by comfort letters. In that respect, a lot of Bill C-48 amounts to technical housekeeping.
As the House is aware, the New Democrats are supporting the bill, but that does not amount to the acceptance of the government's direction on taxation or the belief that this entire process should not be improved. Certainly, the long period between updates to the tax code lead us to the situation that we have now where the legislation becomes so large. If we were to go through this process a little more regularly, we could avoid the scenario where MPs are forced to vote on bills that defy thorough study.
Tax lawyer Thomas McDonnell stated as much in a blog that touches on Bill C-48 as he discussed the legislative process with respect to taxation in both the United States and Canada. He wrote:
This Bill will also be passed without much in the way of informed debate in the House. Most parliamentarians voting on it will admit that they have not read it, let alone tried to fully understand the consequences of voting for (or against) it. This is not how Parliament is supposed to deal with one of its essential functions–the raising of revenue.
With that in mind it seems fairly straightforward to suggest that the government would do well to set a more regular schedule for this type of legislation going forward. I cannot imagine that such a move would be anything but positive, especially for those people whose business it is to work with the tax code.
We know there is broad support to do the work set out in the bill to get these measures into the tax code proper. The Auditor General has told us that it is long overdue. She told Parliament in 2009 that there were at least 400 outstanding technical amendments that had not yet been put into legislation. Over 200 of those outstanding changes are addressed in Bill C-48. While the Auditor General acknowledged that most tax practitioners were relatively happy with the comfort letter process, she noted the need to enact the legislative changes the comfort letters identified. Why it took four years to act on that advice is a question the government will have to answer. With the support it is receiving for Bill C-48 today, it is obvious that this could have been done some time ago.
When we are speaking about taxes, especially in the technical manner that we are today, most Canadians will not be sitting on the edge of their seats. This is not a bill that is likely to be newsworthy, since most of it is old news. What the bill does a lot of is to bring existing measures into the tax code that are designed to curb tax avoidance, which is actually good news for the vast majority of Canadians.
While the political discourse on taxation is often stuck in one gear, namely how to cut taxes, what is usually lost in the debate is the role that taxes play. Despite the universal desire to pay less, most people recognize the necessity of taxes. They allow us to operate as a country and can help us do a lot of good. Let us not forget about all the infrastructure dollars that go into our communities; they come from part of our taxes.
It is also a simple fact that countries require revenue and that revenue largely comes from taxation. What people absolutely want to see is a tax system that is fair, a system that guards against tax avoidance and a system that does not reward those people who are in a position to hide their money from their country. People do not want to feel that they are paying to subsidize others who have managed to use loopholes to minimize their contribution. That will not sit well with hard-working Canadians, and it should not sit well with parliamentarians either.
New Democrats understand this. We believe in cracking down on both tax avoidance and tax evasion, while ensuring the integrity of our tax system. We support the changes being proposed in the bill, especially those that aim to reduce tax avoidance.
The work being proposed in Bill C-48 is long overdue. Among the beneficiaries of the bill will be small businesses. These are the cornerstone of our communities, and it is important for us to do everything we can to create an environment that would make it easier to do business. These business people have enough to worry about without having to consider things like comfort letters. In that respect, what we are debating here is good. We would be streamlining the workload that businesses will have to comply with. Based on what I hear from businesses in my constituency of Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, that would be a good and welcome thing.
As we have heard today, it would be impossible for any one of us to give a detailed account of such a large bill in the limited time we have to speak to the bill, so I will touch on one last item that I believe is timely.
What I am talking about is part 7 of Bill C-48. Part 7 clarifies the minister's authority to amend schedules and annexes to tax administration agreements if doing so does not fundamentally change the terms of the agreement. It would also allow tax administration agreements for the first nations goods and services tax between the federal government and aboriginal governments to be administered through a provincial administration system if the province also administers the federal GST. If we think back to how that issue was bungled when the HST was rolled out in Ontario, it would certainly help us avoid a similar scenario in the future.
I am sure members remember the discussion on the HST in Ontario. When the HST was brought in, how it would affect first nations was an afterthought by the Conservative government. Only some eleventh-hour negotiating at the insistence of Ontario chiefs like Chief Shining Turtle of Whitefish River First Nation, who is also the chair of the United Chiefs and Councils of Mnidoo Mnising First Nations on Manitoulin Island and Anishinabek Nation Grand Council Chief Patrick Madahbee. They avoided a showdown over the issue. In the end the solution was there all along. The Conservative government and the Government of Ontario chose to ignore it until they had no choice.
It is fitting that the Idle No More national day of protest was held in front of Parliament today. This is a similar issue. Some of us, along with the leader of the NDP, took the opportunity to meet with these people who have travelled a long way to bring their message of dissatisfaction to Parliament. Much of the frustration they are expressing comes from exactly the type of oversight that was on display when the HST turned first nations' tax exempt status into an exercise in red tape. What was forgotten at that time was the constitutional obligation of the federal government to meaningfully consult and accommodate first nations in decisions that directly affect them. I would like members to think about that because it seems that people have forgotten those words. I will repeat them: meaningfully consulting, meaningfully accommodating first nations in decisions that directly affect them.
This has been a sticking point for the Conservative government and I hope it has now recognized that first nations are not going to merely roll over and accept top-down directives. Had the government consulted, it would have heard that messing with tax exempt status was a non-starter and it could have moved immediately to the solution. Had the government remembered about the HST fiasco, it would not have gone ahead with the type of legislation that it threw into Bill C-45.
I met with some young people from the Whitefish River first nation. They do not understand why the government is not respecting their treaty rights, the accords and other agreements that have been signed. They are beyond themselves when it comes to the fact that the government often does not respect doing meaningful consultation. They have a right to that. New Democrats are hopeful the government will now show signs of understanding this and will proceed accordingly.
In closing, I reiterate that although New Democrats are supporting this bill, it is by no means an endorsement of the government's tax policies which put too much of the burden on the little guy while allowing an increasingly freer ride for the top earners in this country. We remain unconvinced that such a model is the best way to create wealth or jobs, but that is not the goal of this legislation either.