Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill C-462. When I thought about what I wanted to say concerning this bill, I thought about what a great country we live in, where people can get together across Canada and offer support to those who are less fortunate, those who may lack some of the things that the rest of us sometimes take for granted, and that we can offer financial aid to help make more equitable some of the accidental inequities we have in our society.
One of these things is the disability tax credit. This a credit that allows people with certain long-term disabilities to get some funds to compensate for the fact that a lot of things become more expensive and may require an outlay of funds, if a person has a long-term disability. This tax credit is a non-refundable tax credit, and so for the time being a person has to have a taxable income to claim this tax credit. However, I hope that in the future the House would consider making such a tax credit, and a number of other tax credits, refundable so they are available to help members of our community whom we want to help, but who may not have taxable income against which they could claim a credit.
The Liberal Party and I support this bill in principle and we support moving it to committee to look at some of the details, and it is important to look at the details.
This bill proposes to put some limits on the amount that preparers or promoters could charge individuals to help them make a claim for a disability tax credit. It proposes to set some maximums, according to an as yet undetermined formula, and to create some new offences and penalties in cases where these maximums are exceeded. There is a good reason for that. We have seen reports that rather large amounts have been charged to people seeking the disability tax credit by promoters, preparers who are in the business of helping people make their claims. One of the reasons their fees are charged is that under the legislation it is possible to go back 10 years and claim retroactive amounts for the disability tax credit, so to some extent there may be complications. For that reason there is a small industry that has grown up to explain the disability tax credit to people and to help do the paperwork to file the documents that are needed to claim the credit.
Why is it that the House should get involved at the committee stage to perhaps put some more detail on these maximums? The reason is that we should be looking at a number of things. First, whenever we feel we need to create a new offence and some new penalties, we should think about whether there is another way to help achieve what we want to achieve and not solely rely on creating new penalties and new offences. For example, in this case it may be possible at committee stage that we might decide there are ways to simplify either the tax code or the forms one needs to file to reduce the chance that people need to hire somebody to help them prepare these applications, and so to reduce the chance that the people who need the disability tax credit would have to pay 10% or 20% or sometimes more to these preparers. That is something we should look at, because if there is a way to avoid making a new crime and new punishment, we should be following that.
The other thing one might want to consider is something I will illustrate with an example. This is another thing that should be considered in committee. When I do my taxes, I use an Excel spreadsheet, and most of the time my tax situation is the same from year to year. The first year I set up the Excel spreadsheet, it took a long time to program it and put all the formulas in the cells, but in succeeding years it is much easier. It takes very little time for me to put together my tax return and do all the calculations. Sometimes the laws change and I have to adjust the spreadsheet, and sometimes my personal situation changes, as it did last year, and I have to spend more time changing the spreadsheet and looking at what the rules are.
In the case where, for example, somebody is claiming the disability tax credit, there is a lot of work to do in the first year. People have to look at how this tax credit interacts with all the other parts of their tax situation. In the first tax year, there is a lot of work to be done. We might consider giving more leeway in the first year of a claim for the disability tax credit and then maybe tighter limits in succeeding years when there will be less work to be done. These are the sorts of details that can be considered in committee.
In the proposed bill, there is no definite dollar amount set for the limits. For example, there could be a certain number of dollars for the first few hundred dollars of claims under the disability tax credit and then a percentage for anything above that amount. We need to figure out the right place to put the boundary. On the one hand, we know there is quite a bit of work to be done and people have to know what they are doing. They need to be trained and able to do a good job filing claims for tax credits. On the other hand, we want to discourage people from charging too much or discourage people from not bothering to claim the tax credit because it costs too much to hire someone.
We need to hear from witnesses in committee and look at where that boundary should lie and what is a fair limit to put on the amount tax preparers can charge for preparing a disability tax credit application. We have to be careful not to place a limit that is too low. We might think we have to make sure preparers do not get too much money, but it is also possible to place a limit that is too low, which would discourage people from claiming it because they may not find a tax preparer willing to do the work for the money. We all agree that when people have skills, experience and ability, they deserve to be paid for the high-quality professional work they do. We should be very careful about these sorts of unintended consequences, and that is another reason the committee should hear witnesses on this and not simply rely on the Governor in Council to set all of these numbers. It would be a good idea to hear testimony from witnesses and perhaps make some amendments to the bill in committee.
My colleague who introduced this bill decided to bring forward a bill in the House based on her experience with constituents who are worried about the high fees they might have to pay to claim something they need to help compensate them for their disabilities. I want to congratulate my colleague for doing that, for listening to her constituents and bringing their concerns in the form of a bill to the House of Commons.