“I want the House to pass this bill tonight. It forces the tax agency to measure unpaid taxes, share the data with the budget officer, and publish a list of people convicted of tax cheating. The agency does not share this information and convicts only about twelve tax evaders a year. We need this law so Canadians can see who is not paying their share.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise to participate in Private Members’ Business, because what we are here for is to debate legislation. However, it is disappointing that tonight we are debating this particular bill, because it has passed the Senate not once, not twice, but three times, and it has been presented in this chamber now three times. This bill should have been passed into law quite some time ago. I carried this bill into this chamber in 2019. It was supported by all opposition parties. It was supported by independent members. The only group of people in this chamber that opposed this bill in 2019 was the Liberals. I have some hope that maybe they have smartened up a bit and might support this bill tonight. I hope they will. That is not really the indication that I seemed to get from the last Liberal speaker. I got a lot of self-congratulations for what a wonderful job the Liberals think they have done with the CRA. However, we need this bill, and I am going to talk about it. First, I want to thank the member for Simcoe North for his leadership with respect to tax accountability, for sponsoring this bill in the chamber in this Parliament and in the last Parliament, and for his other bill, Bill C-230, which is an important piece of accountability to ensure that Canadians know what taxes are not collected and what taxes are written off. This bill would do three basic things. It would force the CRA to calculate the tax gap, to share the data on the tax gap with the Parliamentary Budget Officer and to publish a list of tax evaders, those who have been convicted of tax evasion. The Liberals say that the CRA does calculate the tax gap; they do not see what all the fuss is about, but there are several problems with what exists now. The CRA’s reports are not up to date, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer is not able to verify its homework. It does not share the data with the Parliamentary Budget Officer, so we need more than what we are getting right now. The Parliamentary Budget Officer is an important officer of Parliament who is there to help parliamentarians develop policy that is based on the budgetary information that her or she provides. Several parliamentary budget officers have asked for this tax information, and they do not get it. CRA officials have repeatedly said that they will not give the data to the Parliamentary Budget Officer even though they are required to do so by law. They refuse to do so, usually citing some type of privacy excuse for not providing anonymized data to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Yes, this is anonymized data. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has not asked for the identity of any tax filer, nor information that can be identified and connected to any particular tax filer. What the Parliamentary Budget Officer needs in order to do the work of the office is the data so they can come up with their own measurement of the tax gap This is important because there is a history of the CRA, when left to its own devices, underrating its own performance. The Auditor General has repeatedly found that the internal audits of the CRA are not up to snuff. We can think of the call centre at the CRA. The CRA’s internal auditors have thought that it answers the phone reasonably and gives Canadians the information they need. The call centre has been running just fine, according to its internal audits. Every Canadian who has ever called that call centre knows the reality. It hangs up on 70% of the people who call. It gives incorrect information to 30% of the people who actually get through. This is what the Auditor General has found. They found that the CRA’s version of what was going on in the agency was not matched to reality. It is important that the Parliamentary Budget Officer be given the data so that they can make their own estimate on the tax gap and advise Parliament so that parliamentarians have the information to formulate policy and judge legislation. They talk a lot over there about the work they do and about combatting tax evasion, but in reality, we have the Panama papers, in which 900 Canadians were identified. No charges have been laid. In other jurisdictions where citizens were identified, charges were laid and convictions were achieved, but not in Canada. This is important to Canadians, because when people evade their taxes, the rest of Canadians have to pay more. Canadians, by and large, correctly provide information, declare their income accurately and do their best to comply with all of the onerous rules and complicated tax laws of this country. They do their best; they declare their income and pay their taxes, but some do not. It undermines the system and discourages honesty when people get away with evasion. The last thing the bill would do is compel the publication of a list of evaders. Members might know that in a country with over 40 million people and tens of millions of tax returns, corporate and individual returns, excise tax returns and GST returns, all the different types of taxes that are filed, sadly a number of people do not pay their taxes. However, I think many Canadians would be quite disturbed to realize how few people are charged with and convicted of evasion. It is a staggeringly low number. On average, it is about a dozen a year. In a country of 40 million people, does that sound like a government that is tough on evasion? That is within a whole year, with tens of millions of returns. I do not know what the number of false or evasive returns is. We do not have accurate information on that, but most would presume that it is, sadly, a bigger number, and 12 convictions in a year is pretty disappointing. The time for the bill has come. It is time to pass it. Let us have transparency. All members of Parliament, regardless of party, regardless of whether they sit on the government benches or the opposition benches, on behalf of their constituents should surely wish to see a Canada Revenue Agency that does a better job of collecting taxes accurately. Part of being able to do that is to have accurate data and accurate information that can be independently verified and that allows us to transparently see who is evading taxes. Yes, a trial is public, but we cannot search and create a list of evaders from that. An evader is someone who has committed a criminal offence and has been convicted. They do not have the right to privacy and for it to not be known that they have been convicted of a crime. The bill’s time has come. It should have been passed many years ago. I hope that it will pass second reading tonight and move on to the next stage. I hope the Liberals will vote for it. It sounds like all the opposition parties are in favour of the bill. I hope that it passes this stage within the hour.”

“I support this bill. We spend a lot of time checking how the government spends money, but we also need good data on the taxes it fails to collect. This bill will make the tax agency report on unpaid taxes and convictions for tax evasion, and share that data with the Parliamentary Budget Officer. If the government collects what is already owed, honest taxpayers carry less of the burden.”

“Mr. Speaker, we spend a lot of time in this place talking about how the government spends money. We debate appropriations, pore over spending reports from the Parliamentary Budget Officer and call out boondoggles like the arrive scam, PrescribeIT and the green slush fund. That is important work. Bill S-217 has the potential to augment that work by helping Parliament pay the same attention to the revenue side of the ledger, because as we hold governments to account, we should also spend time checking that they do a good job of collecting what is owed and that they do so fairly. Parliament should be just as demanding about the government’s ability to collect money as we are about its authority to spend it. We decide in this place what taxes may be imposed, and we authorize the expenditure of public funds. When revenue goes uncollected, it narrows our choices about borrowing, spending and taxes. We need reliable data to understand that. Canada’s tax system depends heavily on people complying voluntarily. Most businesses in my community are small. Their owners keep records and remit payroll deductions, and at tax time, many still bring a cardboard box of receipts to a bookkeeper or accountant. They pay their taxes even when they are struggling to pay their own bills. When the government does a good and fair job of collecting taxes owed, we have more choices about how to use that money, including reducing what we borrow, reducing the deficit and leaving Canadians with more money in their pockets. When the government does a bad job, more people evade their obligations and honest taxpayers end up carrying more of the burden. Tax evasion hurts us all, and Parliament should be able to get reliable data from the agency that administers the law in ways that will allow us to help ourselves. The tax gap is the difference between the taxes Canadians and businesses legally owe and the amount the government actually collects. Not all of that is due to tax evasion. Taxpayer non-compliance can be intentional or unintentional, and in some cases can result from the inability to pay. It is one of the CRA’s core jobs to minimize the tax gap. Bill S-217 would give Parliament better information to judge how effectively the CRA is doing that and to tell whether we are giving CRA officials the training and tools they need in order to be successful. Bill S-217 would require the CRA’s annual report to include a detailed list of tax evasion convictions, with international cases identified separately. Every three years, it would require tax gap statistics for individuals and corporations, broken down by size and trusts. It would also require the Minister of National Revenue to give the Parliamentary Budget Officer the tax gap data and other information needed for economists and others to do independent analysis. The bill would neither raise taxes, nor give the CRA new investigative powers. What it would ask the CRA to do is to provide data so that we can account for the government’s performance. The CRA already studies the tax gap and publishes some information about convictions. There is considerable expertise that lies behind that work, but the CRA’s willingness to publish information is not the same as Parliament’s right to receive it. Statutory reporting would provide a baseline and a consistent stream of data that we can use for analysis and improvement. It would survive changes in governments and changes in political priorities and would let us test the agency’s assumption longitudinally instead of simply accepting its conclusions. In March, the CRA published estimates for 2014 to 2022. For tax year 2022, its upper bound estimate of the gross federal tax gap was just under $60 billion. After projecting the effect of compliance and collection, the upper bound net gap was closer to $35 billion, or 9.3% of the federal tax revenue covered. These estimates include income tax, GST, HST and excise taxes. That $35 billion is not a pile of cash waiting to be recovered, and it would be wrong to suggest that all of it reflects deliberate evasion. The gap includes unreported taxes and amounts assessed but unpaid, and the estimates depend on assumptions. Parliament still needs to understand where these shortfalls come from and what the CRA does about them. No matter how we look at it, it is big money at a time when we need all the help we can get. Consider the CRA’s 2024-25 departmental results report. It records $18.1 billion in what the agency calls “fiscal impact” from close to 85,000 completed compliance cases. Fiscal impact includes tax assessed, refunds reduced, interest, penalties and the present value of certain future tax assessments. The report expressly says it does not account for amounts reversed on appeal or left uncollected. That is a perfectly legitimate measure, if we understand what it measures. It is not the same thing as money collected. A reassessment is not the final word on what a taxpayer owes. Reassessments can be challenged, and confirmed debts are sometimes uncollectible. It is valuable to know the difference between enforcement activity and recovered revenue. For the 2022 tax year, the CRA’s upper-bound estimate of the corporate income tax reporting gap attributable to large corporations was $17.2 billion. That is an estimate, not a finding of deliberate evasion, but it gives Parliament a good reason to examine this part of the tax system carefully. When former parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux testified on an earlier version of this bill, he explained that section 241 of the Income Tax Act properly protects taxpayer information, yet the CRA sometimes aggregates data so heavily, to protect indirect identification, that it becomes difficult to analyze. Giroux said he needed useful data, not taxpayers’ names. This is an example of the privacy balancing that needs to happen. This bill preserves existing confidentiality restrictions. We still need to test it at committee to know whether it solves the problem he identified. What he suggested was considering a carefully limited exception to section 241, and the committee should examine how to give the PBO useful evidence while protecting Canadians’ private tax affairs. The convictions list needs to be treated with similar care. Criminal prosecutions are appropriate for serious cases, but much tax enforcement takes place through civil reassessments. A higher conviction count does not necessarily mean better administration, because convictions do not always lead to collections. However, it is useful to know when and how well Canadian law has been followed, and whether the government is doing a good job of minimizing that tax gap. The committee should also examine the definition of the tax gap in the bill, which is tied to the Income Tax Act even though the CRA’s overall reporting includes GST, HST and excise. The new requirements should strengthen, not narrow, the reporting that is already available. Better reporting will not replace experienced investigators, and it will not make a complicated tax system easier to comply with. The former parliamentary budget officer testified that simplifying the rules could free CRA staff to concentrate on audits and collections. Instead of adding to the burden on taxpayers, we ought to be looking at where clearer laws and better targeted enforcement would actually improve results. Collecting taxes already legally owed could relieve pressure to borrow or raise rates or create room to lower taxes for Canadians who are already paying their share. Instead of asking Canadians to contribute more at this difficult time, Bill S-217 would help us find out how effectively the government collects what Parliament has already required. That is why I support this bill and have made some suggestions on how the committee could make it a stronger instrument of parliamentary scrutiny. Let us give the Parliamentary Budget Officer the best information she can use, with proper protections for people’s privacy. We should get Parliament better information about what happens after taxes are assessed, and we should insist on an equally credible account of what the government has collected alongside what it spends.”