Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to pick up on a question that I asked during question period. This is an opportunity for me to push a little harder for some answers. We always hope for answers during question period, but adjournment debates give us a little more time to dig a little deeper.
I am hoping for some answers that are a little more detailed and less repetitive than what we have been getting from the Minister of National Revenue. Maybe I will have better luck with the parliamentary secretary. I hope she will not do what her colleague did, which was read his prepared response before he even heard the question.
Having said that, I would like to talk about the KPMG affair, which I asked the Minister of National Revenue about in the House of Commons. I asked her a specific question about whether new criminal charges would be laid, and we hope they will, against those who clearly tried to hide money from the Canada Revenue Agency. These people deposited large sums of money on the Isle of Man, a notorious tax haven with very low corporate tax rates. They hid that money on purpose to avoid paying their fair share of taxes here in Canada. The strategy was set up in the early 2000s and was used by wealthy Canadian families. Fortunately, the scheme was discovered and, thanks to a number of media outlets, some of those taxpayers were even identified.
The problem in all this is that although we know the identity of some of these taxpayers, the Canada Revenue Agency may know of others that the public is not aware of. We hope to get more names from KPMG, the firm that set up the scheme and provided assistance. We hope that once the CRA has these names it will hand out real penalties and be tough on these people who were caught red-handed evading taxes and defrauding the agency.
People who commit this type of fraud defraud all Canadians. When some people decide not to pay their fair share, then all the other taxpayers have to pay a bit more to get the services that they expect from their government.
These people have still not been punished. Worse yet, there were secret deals between the Canada Revenue Agency and these taxpayers, which let them off the hook. They were asked to pay a certain sum of money to bring down the penalty. They were then told that the matter would be dropped and they would be as free as a bird. These are the secret deals that the media reported on. We saw documents signed by Ms. Henderson, a manager at CRA.
During the question period I am referring to, I asked the minister to tell me when there would be criminal charges and when the matter would be handed over to the director of public prosecutions so that he could lay charges for fraud and tax evasion against the taxpayers who used the KPMG scheme.
I not only asked what would be done, but I also asked whether the minister would commit to truly seeing this through. Unfortunately she made no such commitment. She did not make any promises. This is an opportunity for the parliamentary secretary to make a clear commitment regarding criminal charges against KPMG clients.