Well, Mr. Speaker, we would ask what that has to do with the economy. Why would the Conservatives use a budget bill to infringe on the privacy and the rights of Canadians? The Privacy Commissioner herself stepped forward and said she had grave concerns about what is being presented and how it is being presented because it is not getting the proper scrutiny and is likely in contravention of the Privacy Act. The government and its officials said that if there were parts of this bill that would override the Privacy Act, then that was okay; that was how they saw it.
However, there is this one small problem, which is that the Privacy Act is a quasi-constitutional act, and they cannot just simply override it because they want to. That is a very good idea, to have in our laws that we see privacy as so important that we include it at the level of importance of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that we have instituted in this country. We New Democrats think that is a fantastic, very good piece of legislation, yet here the government is proposing that we simply override it, never mind it; and there will be yet another court challenge.
We talked about injured vets. I heard my Liberal colleagues talking about this. The Conservatives talk about vets and how much they care about our heroes. Theirs is a government that was clawing back from veterans who had been injured while serving Canadians. These are people suffering physical ailments and also those suffering from things like PTSD. They had some of their benefits clawed back by the government since 2006. The Conservatives said they would redress this in this budget bill, and they went back three months, ignoring the six years prior, and said that was good enough and the vets should be happy. In fact, they came before the committee and said that the vets should be grateful for what they have done. They cannot imagine why Canadian veterans and their spouses have to chase this Minister of Veterans Affairs down the hall just to be shown a modicum of respect.
Regarding FATCA, I could do an entire speech on this agreement. The Conservatives said they wrestled hard with those Americans and they really brought them to their knees, and they got basically nothing. According to StatsCan, up to a million Canadians could be impacted by this. This is how it would work under this bill that these Conservatives are voting for and passing. The private banking information of Canadians, if judged by their banking institution to have some connection to the United States, as ephemeral as it wants, will be passed on to the IRS by the CRA, which will play some kind of middle-man, enabling role.
Why would the private banking information of Canadians be passed on to the IRS? It is because the Conservatives could not get a deal, and they were more interested in protecting their friends on Bay Street and making sure the banks did not have any trouble, but they did not protect the privacy rights of Canadians.
That is why we are voting against this bad legislation. That is why Canadians can count on New Democrats to stand up for their rights here in Parliament and across the country.