Daniel Paillé

[Petitions, March 7th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to apologize to you as well as to the hon. member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue. I am pleased to present a second petition, which is every bit as important as the first. I had forgotten about it. I am sorry.

[Petitions, March 7th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition from people in Hochelaga who are concerned about low income housing.

These buildings were constructed in the 1970s and are in dire need of renovations. People from across Quebec have spoken to me about this type of problem.

[Government Spending, March 2nd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, according to the 2011-12 estimates, the Conservatives plan to make significant budget cuts, particularly in the areas of environment and culture. Even the contribution to the International Criminal Court has been decreased by 64%. And yet the Conservatives still want the court to look into the actions of the Libyan dictator! This is typical of their ideology. Nevertheless, they do not hesitate to expand prisons. Who knows? Perhaps it is so that they will have somewhere to put Conservative fraudsters.

How can the government claim to be addressing Quebeckers' priorities when it is cutting the budgets for environment and culture? These estimates are really not good for Quebec.

[Privilege, March 1st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I was here just a few moments ago when our NDP colleague mentioned a possible leak. Like all the members of the House who are rising to speak, I have no reason not to believe the hon. member. The facts, if they prove to be true, are rather troubling. I have been a member of this House for only a short time, and during the last session, the member for Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar leaked, from her office over the Internet, some prebudget consultations we had had. We spoke out passionately against the situation.

I have been a member of another parliament, the Quebec National Assembly, and I have also worked in the public service, in the Quebec finance department. I know how careful a government or a minister must be when it comes to certain publications, particularly budget speeches and estimates. This is not a one-page document. It is a huge document that was allegedly released before it was even tabled in the House.

There was an instance when a Liberal Party finance minister in Quebec, Gérard D. Levesque, unexpectedly had to read out a version of the budget speech one evening. If my memory serves correctly, it was a Thursday evening, but the budget was supposed to be read the following week. Why? Because moments before, photos of photocopies had been accidentally lost. There was a possibility that the information could be made public the following morning. At the time, the minister took responsibility and read his budget speech a week early.

Today, a document containing all the Canadian government's spending information may have been leaked. That is significant. A member said that it could affect the budget, the stock market and the decisions of people who know things before others do. Parliamentarians must be given this information, in a transparent way, before or at the same time as the rest of the population.

We do not even know when the budget will be tabled. The Conservatives are being smart alecks and saying that it will be soon, maybe the 22nd or 24th of March, depending on the weather and the direction of the wind. This government should act responsibly and tell the people and parliamentarians when the budget will be tabled. When estimates are tabled, the government needs to make sure nothing is leaked. When there are leaks of this kind, the minister responsible should resign. When it comes to budget estimates or the budget itself, the question should then be whether or not a leak means that the government should resign.

[Business of Supply, February 17th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for her question.

If I were to go to her wonderful riding of Trois Rivières to talk to her constituents without having brought any documentation, she would tell me to come back with something on paper.

I have often had the opportunity to meet with Mr. Page, and I have told him just how much I admire him. He is feeling his way in the dark. He is paddling upstream. He has no information, and there is not a hint of co-operation from the government. The proof is in how the Minister of Finance here sometimes responds to questions about Mr. Page's projections. He looks down on Mr. Page. That is disrespectful. The Minister of Finance needs to show more respect for the Parliamentary Budget Officer because he is our Parliamentary Budget Officer.

[Business of Supply, February 17th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to pick up on my colleague's comments to make the connection with what we are currently studying in the Standing Committee on Finance. We are working on the definition of tax avoidance or tax evasion with regard to tax havens. Tax avoidance is when a person tries to legally pay as little tax as possible. They try to avoid paying too much tax. There are even anti-avoidance rules.

Questions surround tax evasion. People want to know how much tax evasion occurs, and the government is making up numbers. In this case, these numbers are not accurate. By definition, we do not know how much tax evasion goes on. This morning, I made an analogy with someone who escapes from prison. Do not ask me where he is. If I knew, I would go after him. Tax evasion is the same thing.

There is information control for the sake of ideology, but in the case of tax evasion, in the case of tax avoidance and tax havens, I think there is a lack of leadership by this government. It is asking people to make voluntary declarations and saying the slate will be wiped clean. It is too bad, but that is not how things work. That is a lack of leadership.

[Business of Supply, February 17th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary is mixing things up, just as she mixed things up earlier regarding Tim Hortons' ownership and taxes and whether it was in Delaware or Toronto. In this particular case, I am not sure whether she mixed them up consciously, but that is what she did. The Bloc Québécois caucus met with the Conseil du patronat du Québec for an hour and a half, much longer than the 10 minutes it appeared before the Standing Committee on Finance.

I do not know whether the Conservative caucus met with the Conseil du patronat du Québec for an hour and a half, but we did. We discussed the recommendations in the document entitled “Au tour du Québec”, and that organization agreed with most of them. We discussed things based on what we had on the table. The purpose of today's Liberal motion is certainly not to turn me into a Liberal. If they thought they had the slightest chance of doing that, they would certainly have their work cut out for them. We want to exercise our power with documentation.

[Business of Supply, February 17th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take advantage of my colleague's comment to pay tribute to him. He is one of the most experienced parliamentarians, and he sits with me on the Standing Committee on Finance. I like to watch him work because he takes all of the information that he has gathered over the years as a parliamentarian and links it all together. That is how he works. Sometimes we agree with him, sometimes we do not. But being able to choose to agree or disagree is the basis of democracy. It is very important to know what is what, how the effect of something is calculated and why things are being done. Then we can have discussions. But when we are kept in the dark, it does not matter what party we belong to. We are all in the dark.

[Business of Supply, February 17th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Saint Boniface has a number of good intentions, but her Tim Hortons in Saint Boniface is a lot like the ones in my riding of Hochelaga. Even the Tim Hortons on Ontario Street in Montreal has always paid taxes to Quebec and Canada. Delaware is not the problem. The fact that the company became Canadian again, as she said, is the result of an initial public offering that was done by the parent company, Wendy's, which has owned Tim Hortons for many years. Obviously we will learn these kinds of things.

We are here today because on November 17, 2010, the Standing Committee on Finance, of which I am a member, adopted a motion. I will read some points:

The committee also orders that the Government of Canada provide the committee with electronic copies of the following...

We were not asking a lot. We did not want a tonne of papers. We wanted electronic copies of the five-year projections of total corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate tax rates from 2010 to 2015. If the Department of Finance was able to publish budget documents last year, it is because it had them.

On November 17, 2010, we asked for detailed cost accounting, analysis and projections, including assumptions, for each of the bills, conducted in accordance with the Treasury Board guide to costing. Again, it was already there. We asked about what the Treasury Board had and asked that it be sent to us electronically.

The committee's motion says the following:

That the committee orders that all information requested in this motion from the Government of Canada be provided to the committee within 7 calendar days.

That is what we wanted on November 17. Now it is February 17, three months later. We asked for the information within seven days, but we have still not received anything 90 days later. On November 24, seven days after our request, we received a response saying that “projections of corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate income tax rates are a Cabinet confidence. As such, we are not in a position to provide these series to the Committee.”

That is why we are here. Upon its return on February 3, the Standing Committee on Finance looked at the Government of Canada's pitiful response. We spoke to the committee chair, who, I must add, does a wonderful job. And this is what was written in the committee chair's report:

...the Committee wishes to draw the attention of the House on what appears to be a breach of its privileges by the Government of Canada’s refusal to provide documents ordered by the Committee, and recommends [the Standing Committee on Finance, on which the Saint Boniface member sits] that House take whatever measures it deems appropriate.

I raised questions in the House as recently as yesterday. I first spoke about how the Parliamentary Budget Officer has spoken out against the government's obscurantism and the fact that it too often uses the cloak of cabinet confidence.

I was asking if the government would understand a basic principle of democracy: House privileges exist and the federal spending power is granted to the government by us here in the House. The power comes from here. Therefore, in order to grant that power, we need information.

The President of the Treasury Board replied that if the Parliamentary Budget Officer wanted information, all he had to do was call him and the Treasury Board president would provide it. I poked fun at him and suggested that the two of them had gone out for a beer to discuss it. That is not how a government works or how it should work.

Today's motion states that the Canadian Constitution gives Parliament the absolute power to require the government to produce documents, yet the government persistently refuses to do so, despite our reasonable request. We requested electronic documents and information that have been available in past years. Thus, our requests are reasonable.

Three months later, we have received nothing, absolutely nothing. Is it important? Everyone here has been elected to this House. What are we all doing here, on either side of the House? We are here to exercise a certain power. That power is not to simply sit here on this side of the House and complacently admire what the government does. Some members choose to do that, and that is fine. Let them sit there and complacently listen to what the government tells them to do; let them read their planted questions and complacently read their members' statements. However, they are not exercising the power given to us by voters. I represent Hochelaga. Other members represent other ridings. The voters give us a mandate to exercise some power in the House. Some members have the power to govern, yes, but the power of the House exists and we must exercise it. During the next election—very soon, according to rumours—some voters will say that they sent us to Ottawa to exercise some power and that we failed to do so. That is a serious judgment.

What do we need to exercise power? We need information. It is a universally recognized fundamental principle that information is power. It is our right. You know that better than I do, but I just want to reiterate that to inexperienced hon. members. A long time ago, almost 100 years ago, in 1916, Bourinot said that “it is the constitutional right of either House to ask for such information as it can directly obtain by its own order from any department”.

We can keep quoting from our procedural guides. As a new MP, I read the House of Commons Procedure and Practice from cover to cover because if I am going to sit here I want to know how things work. It says that, legally, “Parliament has the ability to institute its own inquiries, to require the attendance of witnesses and to order the production of documents”. Why does it say that? Because documents are essential to the proper functioning of Parliament. It says that quite clearly.

Further, the Standing Orders talk about the standing committees, which brings me to my point. The parliamentary secretary, who is still here, can sit on those committees. What do the standing orders say about the standing committees? They say the same thing: that we can order the production of documents, etc. It is essential to committee work, they say. To order the production of documents we can adopt a motion to that effect. That is what we did. According to the Standing Orders, this power is absolute and has no limits.

They cannot say: “There are limits”. As long as the request is reasonable, we can ask for a document and obtain it.

Further on, it says that if something happens and we do not obtain the documentation, one option at our disposal is to move a motion requiring the government to produce it.

I have not been a member of Parliament for very long. However, this is the second time we have found ourselves in this type of situation. On April 27, 2010, the House took the government to task over documents pertaining to Afghan detainees. Probably all of us have children and grandchildren. When they are admonished once, it does not mean that it applies only the one time and that they can misbehave again. At a given point, enough is enough. This is now the second time, at least since I entered federal politics. It is not right.

On April 27, the Speaker ruled that it is an indisputable privilege, on which the parliamentary system is based, and he ordered the government to do its job.

In the case of the Afghan detainees, national security was the reason given by the government. Today, they are claiming cabinet confidence. Every day, they invent something new. They will invent something else for the next time. I am still trying to understand why the Conservatives are doing this.

Just yesterday, the second question I asked the President of the Treasury Board was why it had become a secret. I even gave him some possible answers. Does the government have something to hide? Is it incompetent? Intransigent? Incapable? Inept? Powerless? Insolent? Motivated by ideology? Perhaps the government does not want to provide the information. For ideological reasons, it wants to hide things.

We have a fine example, that of the Minister of International Cooperation. She hid the facts for one year. We wonder why she did it. She did not do it inadvertently, out of incompetence or for lack of authority. She was motivated by ideology. She did not want to make it seem as though she had changed the recommendation. The government does have the right to decide, but it must do so appropriately, without hiding anything, and without preventing us from exercising our authority to ask questions.

Information management by this government is an issue, and unfortunately not just in this case. There is also the long form census. That is another fine example. Ever since Canada came into being, there have been census forms. We have measurements, we have the right to statistics and information. Why? To exercise power.

I am thinking of the father of the member for Louis-Hébert, who is my brother and a noted demographer. Where will he go for information? His entire career has been based on information collected during the census. What will he do? What will future demographers do? We are talking about the power of information and information management. The Information Commissioner is complaining because it takes too long to get information. Why are they not providing the information? Why are they keeping it? It is important because we are talking about corporate taxes. Corporate taxes are important because our tax system is based on what? Either we tax individuals or we tax businesses.

If we decide to tax businesses, we tax SMEs or we tax large corporations. The government says that it wants lower taxes for large corporations. Why? It must give us some information on that.

Since 2007, the taxes for SMEs have been cut from 12% to 11%, a difference of 8%. But for large corporations, taxes have gone from 22% to 15%, a difference of 32%. Anyone who is familiar with the second derivative can calculate that the tax cut for SMEs is four times lower. I want to know because we believe that tax policy is important. I want to know where the Conservatives are getting their numbers.

The Bloc Québécois has released its budget bible for this year. We think that it should be Quebec's turn. The bible was given to the Minister of Finance. The Minister of State for Finance was there, as was the member for Saint Boniface. They said that it was serious work, and it was. We worked hard with the information we had and we want to continue to do so.

I have the 2010 annual report of the Royal Bank of Canada right here. It is not the report for 1810 but for 2010. The estimates of the taxes that would be payable if all foreign subsidiaries' accumulated unremitted earnings were repatriated are set out on page 125. We have the information from the Royal Bank. The estimates are $763 million for 2010, $821 million for 2009 and $920 million for 2008. I have information. I can say whether or not I agree. I can form my own opinion because I have the facts. The government is hiding the facts from us.

For as long as we are here, we will act as an ethics watchdog. We know what the Liberals' ethics led to. We need only look so far as the sponsorship scandal. They wanted to circumvent or violate the law but they were punished. The Conservatives think that exercising power means having complete control. That is not what it means to exercise power.

Public funds do not belong to the Liberal Party of Canada. They know that; they paid for it. Public funds do not belong to the Conservative Party of Canada. The money is not theirs. They cannot do whatever they want with it, however they want, without any accountability and without telling us how they are using it.

The Bloc Québécois's opinion has not changed. Why are we working toward independence for Quebec? There are three reasons: to sign our own treaties, pass our own laws and collect our own taxes. We want to have a tax policy that will make it possible to distribute the wealth much more effectively. We have the means to do it because we have information on this subject. A lack of information about big business restricts my freedom. I do not think that I came her to have my freedom restricted.

[Business of Supply, February 17th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague spoke at length about Tim Hortons. I would like to ask her whether the benefit she mentioned, the return of Tim Hortons, was not simply related to Wendy's, the American parent company that held 100% of Tim Hortons. Through an IPO—initial public offering—and share dividends for its shareholders, Tim Hortons was returned to Wendy's shareholders.