Madam Speaker, it is such a pleasure to rise in support of this very excellent bill, presented by my very excellent colleague from Simcoe North.
The bill is important. It speaks to principles that are fundamental to a just government, to fairness and to transparency. I am sorry to say that these principles have been sorely lacking in the actions of the Liberal government over the last 10 years.
For those just tuning in at home, every year for the last 10 years the Canada Revenue Agency has forgiven or written off more than a billion dollars in taxes or loans owed. In the last fiscal year of 2023‑24, it was $18 billion. As my colleague just mentioned, this is on the order of our entire defence spending, which is about $35 billion a year.
For those watching at home, I am thinking of my friend Dave, who is a plumber, and my friend Ryan, who is a contractor. Yesterday, we had a skating event put on by my office in Kitchener, where I met Dragon, a short-haul truck driver, and Lilly, a grade one schoolteacher. Did they receive any forgiveness on their taxes? Did they receive any writeoffs on their loans to the CRA? The answer is that they did not. The vast majority of these writeoffs went to large corporate fat cats who have big lobbyist budgets and spend a lot of time in the offices of the government across the way.
The CRA is systematically forgiving the taxes that massive corporations owe to the public. The Globe and Mail reported that last year only 11 corporations accounted for nearly a quarter of the writeoffs. This arrangement raises the question: Who is the government working for? Is it working for the people or for its friends on Bay Street?
I can think of two cases in recent memory where the same question arose and where the same principles of transparency and fairness were broken all across the land. One was the COVID pandemic and the mom-and-pop stores. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was teaching medicine at Queen's University in Kingston. There was a hardware store downtown that stood for 70 years. It was run by the Vandervoorts and was called the Vandervoort General Store. Unfortunately, it closed after 70 years of continuously serving the community while Canadian Tire, Home Depot and Walmart all stood open.
Similarly, small-time mom-and-pop gyms were closed down while major branches managed to stay open. How did that happen? Through my work in politics, I have come to know some of these lobbyists. They had gigantic contracts lobbying governments, both federal and provincial, to stay open in a way the Vandervoort hardware store simply could not do.
Another major example is the SNC-Lavalin scandal. If I were to bribe the dictator of Libya and provide strippers to his sons, I think I would go to jail. However, if I were the proprietors of SNC-Lavalin, I would have the former prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, in the Attorney General's office, violating the principle of prosecutorial independence, which by the way is the same principle the President of the United States broke, resulting in his first impeachment. SNC-Lavalin was able to get its lobbyists, who had the ear of the prime minister, to get sweetheart deals for forgiveness, similar to what the CRA is dishing out to massive corporations, while mom and pop get nothing. However, I do not have any interest in bribing the dictator of Libya anytime soon.