Mr. Speaker, cutting CRA at a time when the Auditor General says there is $29 billion out there that needs to be collected is a very strange move indeed.
If a government finds that there is money to be collected, it should increase the size of the tax-collecting agency and actually go after the very people who are hiding this tax.
The money in offshore bank accounts is not the money of ordinary working Canadians. It is not from the person running a mom-and-pop store on the corner of a street in Winnipeg or from people who are working for a living by putting in plumbing; it is from those with the ability and the wherewithal to hide money offshore.
Those are people much richer than you or I. Those are the people who are able to hide money, and we are allowing it to happen. The government ought to be spending a whole lot more money on the CRA to make sure those kinds of things stop happening.