Madam Speaker, I am glad to be able to speak to this bill. I feel quite strongly about the issues within it. This came to my attention a few years ago as a problem when, in an Order Paper question, which, unlike a question during question period, is something the government is required to answer. The government is not allowed to just tap dance around and refuse to answer an Order Paper question. To refuse would actually be a contempt of Parliament, so Order Paper questions are a good way to try to force real answers from the government.
In response to a question about the nature of tax losses, writeoffs by the CRA from large corporate filers that have had their tax obligations to the Crown, to the people of Canada, written off, the information we received back was very minimal. If I recall correctly, we did get the dollar figures for the larger writeoffs that had occurred. It actually generated some speculation in the media about who these corporate entities might have been, but they were not named. At least we had an idea of the scale of the large writeoffs that had occurred at the Canada Revenue Agency.
In subsequent years, though, the CRA has taken an even less transparent approach to these questions and outright refused to answer them, citing privacy. We are not talking about individuals; we are talking about corporate filings. The CRA is citing privacy, meaning that the concern is that it would be possible to guess the identity of these corporate filers having their taxes written off.
This bill is a great step forward in clarifying and giving legal direction to ensure the publication of this important information. However, I would like to stress that this is a pretty small step in the problem of ever-increasing writeoffs. Why is the agency failing to collect taxes? What is going on that is triggering these writeoffs? If we knew who it was, we would be able to identify maybe whether it was a matter of bankruptcy, and we would be able to know whether there was maybe public money that is tied up as well, or whether there were subsidies paid to the business. We would have a better idea of the whole overall problem if we had that information.
It is part of a pattern of ever-decreasing transparency from the government. This is a trend that is getting worse. It is actually very unfortunate that we are having to resort to legislation for something that the CRA really ought to be doing on its own and consciously chose to stop, or even that it is reducing the amount of information it gives to Canadians.
I know in Private Members' Business we cannot debate back and forth, but earlier tonight we heard praise for the CRA and the wonderful work it does. No doubt there are thousands of good, solid and hard-working people at the CRA, but we have an army in this country of 59,000 tax collectors, and they are writing off these enormous amounts. They fail to collect from offshore filers and give special breaks to offshore filers. They do not answer the phone, and they do not give correct information when they do get to the phone. There are some really serious problems at this agency, and this bill is just one small piece, which I support vigorously to try to improve the CRA.