Mr. Speaker, I previously had the opportunity to question the minister on the performance of the CRA after the Auditor General had released a report on her findings on the performance standards at the CRA. I think it is important to start this off by reading a couple of fine points from her findings.
She starts off with a line about how “The Taxpayer Bill of Rights states that callers have the right to complete, accurate, clear, and timely information.” I think that is kind of at the heart of the Auditor General's report. It is also at the heart of the experience that Canadians have had when dealing with the CRA over the last number of years.
The Canada Revenue Agency, interestingly enough, has the ability to adjust its own service standards, and it is interesting to note that in 2017:
the Canada Revenue Agency’s service standard was to have 80% of calls answered by an agent within 2 minutes. Starting in the 2019–20 fiscal year, the agency lowered the standard to 65% of calls answered within 15 minutes.
The number of complaints relating to the service provided by the contact centres increased by 145% since 2021–22.
That is kind of at the heart of the issue here. The CRA recognized that they could not keep up with the service, so rather than try to figure out how they could offer better service to Canadians, they said they were just going to lower the threshold and criteria that were required to say that they were offering better service to Canadians. Then, they followed that up by providing even less service to Canadians, with wait times being beyond unacceptable. This past summer, there are people who spent entire weeks trying to get hold of CRA without being able to get through, having to call back in at the beginning of the day every day, sitting on hold and not ever getting through.
I just recently received an email. Actually, it was today. It was an email from a lady who spent months dealing with the CRA because of an issue with the CRA. It was not anything she did wrong but something CRA did wrong, and she ended up having to go through the courts in order to be able to get the situation rectified. The court sided with her, and finally she had this issue resolved. It should not have to take going to court in order to get CRA to do their job properly.
I had another case of an individual. We have been working with this person for over four years now, trying to settle an estate. They lost a loved one, and the biggest hold-up in that whole process was the CRA. It has taken over four years to resolve an issue with them, and the issue is still unresolved. That is not acceptable. That is the kind of problem that Canadians are routinely finding themselves faced with.
What has the CRA gotten for that? It has gotten a 70% budget increase for the absolutely abysmal, terrible service that Canadians have been receiving. It would be great to see this government take responsibility. The Liberals have been giving us a word salad about how there is a 100-day action plan for the CRA to get its act together and provide better service for Canadians.
As of right now, tax season was back in April, and we are near the end of the calendar year here, with only a couple of months left, so they are going to say that wait times have improved. Let us just wait until next April, when Canadians start filing taxes again, and see if their 100-day action plan actually bore any fruit.
I am just wondering if the minister or the parliamentary secretary here is going to be willing to stand up today and guarantee that Canadians will receive better service standards than they received this last tax season.