Madam Speaker, I am glad that got a laugh.
What the bill would do is restore some of the fairness and some of the transparency. If it passes, which I dearly hope it will, and the CRA forgives more than a million dollars in loans or taxes, it would at least have to say who it gave it to and why. I think the vast majority of Canadians would never see a million dollars, let alone have a tax bill of over a million dollars. It is very simple. It does not say that it cannot continue to exercise this forgiveness; rather, it says that the public is owed a debt, that the government, in its boundless wisdom, has decided to write off that debt, and that we need to know whose it was and why. At the very least, it would give us the opportunity to look at the lobbying registry to see how much that corporation paid to lobby the Liberal government and to ask if those two numbers were related.
For those watching at home, I have to say I was so struck, shortly after my election, the first time I opened my parliamentary email. There were literally hundreds of invitations to meet with lobbyists, and there were hundreds of invitations to attend receptions in downtown Ottawa. I instructed my staff, if the meeting did not say Kitchener South—Hespeler somewhere in it, if it was not from a constituent of mine, I did not want to take it.
Let me say that from what I have observed during my time here, many of those meetings and receptions are attended by the members opposite. It is my view that these corporations do not spend all that money on lobbying for no reason. They know how to get a return on investment, and I think they are getting that return on investment, as evidenced by the $18 billion that the government forgave large corporations in the last fiscal year.
We want transparency. We want the registry. We want to start asking these questions. It was, by the way, my understanding that the common practice, for years and years, was that parliamentarians could at least ask Order Paper questions and put to the government, “Who did you forgive and why?” However, just in recent years, the CRA has stopped providing that basic transparency. We used to have it by convention, and somehow it has gone away over the last 10 years. Now we need to actually write it into the law that this transparency must exist henceforth. I think it is a shame. I wish that we could use the honour system and could continue with our tradition of open government. It is particularly a shame, given that 10 years ago Justin Trudeau came to power promising to have the most transparent government in Canadian history. In this and so many other ways, we have been betrayed.
That is about as much as I have to say about it. I know that the members opposite like to say that they are in a new government and are doing new things. This would be a tremendous opportunity for them to turn away from the legacy of the Trudeau government and the legacy of restricting transparency and begin to restore that transparency, even in this small way. Again, this is not going to send anyone to jail. This is not going to stop the practice of gigantic writeoffs for corporate fat cats with a stable of lobbyists, but it is at least going to give the public the answers they deserve.
I urge everyone in the House to vote for this bill. For the members opposite, when they vote for this bill, I urge them to consider apologizing for their actions during COVID and apologizing for their actions during the SNC-Lavalin scandal. I hope that Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott will be invited back to their caucus soon.