Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and speak to today's opposition motion from the NDP.
I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup.
It is always a pleasure to speak in the House. There is much in today's motion from the NDP. There is much sentiment behind it, for which I have much sympathy, and I may agree with some of the objectives; however, I am not going to be supporting it, and I am going to explain why.
It is a two-part motion. Part A talks about what the NDP characterizes as the loophole for stock option deduction. I do not agree that the ability to declare income from exercising stock options is a capital gain as opposed to income is a loophole. A loophole is something that is an unintended consequence or a runaround that one does to get around the intent of the law or a rule.
The existence of the ability to deduct exercised profits from stock options was a deliberate policy choice. It was not a loophole, something that people are sneaking around to do. It was a policy choice originally made for important reasons. It was designed to encourage entrepreneurialism. It was designed to encourage Canadians—and not just Canadians; this is tax policy that exists in other countries as well—to go into business and be able to offer employees, or proprietors of a business, to defer compensation, to be able at the start-up stage of an enterprise to put all of the money that is available and all capital into getting the business off the ground.
When people agree to compensation by stock option, they are inherently taking on significant risk. If the enterprise fails, then there is no compensation. When a start-up company, particularly in the high-tech sector, is struggling to capitalize itself and struggling to compete for talent, being able to defer compensation through stock options is an important way for the company to more efficiently and effectively capitalize its business.
While indeed stock options are a common form of CEO compensation, they are also a common form of compensation not only in the high-tech business, but also in the resource sector, in mining, or oil and gas exploration. It allows companies to capitalize themselves without paying as much in salary compensation. It is often throughout the enterprise that stock options are available.
In my career in the mortgage business in Calgary, I saw many examples of decidedly non-CEOs and non-one percenters who earned compensation from stock options. Sometimes it is every person in the company who might be eligible for stock options. They have taken substantial risk by putting their personal compensation into the hands of the enterprise and its success.
It was a fairly deliberate decision to allow this, so it is not a loophole. I presume we will agree to disagree on whether it is a good thing and agree to disagree that the taxation should be treated differently, but I do not believe it is a loophole, nor is it correct to characterize it as such. I will not support the motion because I do not agree with that part of it.
Moving to part B of the motion, I agree. As a Conservative, and indeed as a Canadian citizen, I absolutely support the rule of law. I support ensuring that all Canadians follow the law, and that the Canada Revenue Agency follow the law and collect taxes from those Canadians who are not paying what they are required to under law. It is extremely important, especially in the self-reporting system, that Canadians all understand that following and obeying the law is important.
It is troubling to know there are people who deliberately subvert the law through offshore tax arrangements, and that in some cases Canadians are following the law but subverting its intent or spirit. Where that is the case, the law should indeed be changed as required.
We have heard a lot in this debate about tax fairness. We have heard it in speeches for the motion, and we have heard it from the government side. When we have heard those speaking from the government side of the aisle, it is quite troubling to hear some of the things that have been brought into the discussion, the patting on the back for a job well done. The speaker before the NDP talked about $1 billion going into tax avoidance and evasion, but was unable to answer the question about how much of that was targeted to offshore evasion, which is the subject of the motion.
The truth is that numbers like those of the expenditures of the agency have been thrown about repeatedly in debate in this House. The Minister of National Revenue's own department has revealed that much of this is quite misleading. In answers to questions from the NDP about recovering offshore evasion, we have heard about recovering 20 billion dollars' worth of taxes, and in fact budgeting that money. The minister's own department reveals that it believes that only a small fraction of that will ever be captured, and that most of the money under that number is really domestic taxes and not the foreign taxes that were the subject of that motion and of this motion, and many of the questions that have been raised.
The Liberals speak of fairness. What does tax fairness look like under the Liberals and this minister's Canada Revenue Agency? Is it tax fairness to target disabled Canadians by changing the documentation on the disability tax credit, on May 2, and then denying for months that anything has changed, even while the rate goes from an 80% acceptance rate to an 80% rejection rate?
Is it fairness to change the folio, which gives instruction to professional tax preparers, so that they tax the employee discounts for retail and restaurant workers, and then again blame it on the bureaucrats once it comes to light, saying that it was not actual government policy? Well, it was. It was published in the folio, and it came to the attention of Canadians only when the agency itself reported it to the media. Is going after low-wage workers tax fairness?
In one of the speeches earlier, we heard about targeting single parents. Is denying the child tax benefit to single moms and single dads tax fairness? It is not fairness to say to single parents that they have to hire a lawyer, prepare a separation agreement, go through all the work in a failed marriage or partnership to find the other parent and have him or her agree to it, submit it to the CRA, and then have the CRA again say that it is not good enough, that it is not acceptable evidence of being a single parent. We have heard these stories from MPs and their constituency offices. Targeting single parents, diabetics, and low-wage workers is not many people's idea of tax fairness.
We talked about all the additional money going to the Canada Revenue Agency. This money has been going in each year. We are in the third year of this government. Right now, there is an 18-month delay for appeals at the Canada Revenue Agency. If the agency improperly assesses someone and that person goes to appeal, the interest clock starts ticking, and there are 18 months of delay before the hearing takes place. Is that tax fairness?
We will not support the motion. I will leave it at that for questions and comments.