Madam Speaker, I rise tonight to again talk about a question that came up last November.
In November, I had asked the Minister of National Revenue about her mandate to provide a more client-focused Canada Revenue Agency. I pointed out then that under her watch, her department had reversed or changed the policy on type 1 diabetics to deny the tax credit to many Canadians who had qualified for many years.
I raised a number of issues, including the sort of half-baked plans the department had to tax retail and restaurant workers. I mentioned the busy signals or hang-ups at the call centre. However, the main part of my question then was in reaction to a growing number of accounts that we had heard. Some were raised by my colleague, the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, about targeting single parents, telling them they had not supplied sufficient evidence, or they were in fact separated or divorced, causing all kinds of consternation for some folks about having to obtain, sometimes at great expense, separation agreements, which were then still rejected as evidence of separation for tax purposes. The response I had to that question was wholly inadequate, hence why we are revisiting it tonight.
The minister talked about the intention of having a client-focused Canada Revenue Agency and being instructed through a mandate letter to do so. She talked about how the agency did not really try to hurt anybody, suggesting that anybody who was having problems providing the documents required should contact the CRA for help.
I thought that was a particularly ironic response, given that we were already seized with the matter of the call centre debacle, where almost two-thirds of the people who did call the centre for help were simply hung up on. Of those who actually did get through, 30% of the people were given wrong information. Being given wrong information is probably worse. It makes taxpayers worse off than they were before they made the phone call. They think they have been told something that will affect their course of action with compliance, but they are in fact wrong. They may have been better off having not called at all.
Therefore, it is really not an adequate response to say that people should call the CRA and it will help them out. We already know from the Auditor General's report the sort of futility that surrounds that.
I can imagine we may hear tonight more blaming of the previous government, saying the Liberals inherited a situation that was so bad that there was nothing they could do to fix it. However, it has been two and half years. There is a certain point at which they have to own their track record. The deterioration of the service that many tax preparers are reporting to me have been accelerating in the last couple of years.
Notwithstanding that, I am certain the previous government did not get everything right and not everything went perfectly. However, this is not a race to the bottom to see who can deliver the worst service to Canadians.
Canadians need answers and they need a plan to deliver a truly client or taxpayer-focused Canada Revenue Agency.