Hon. Joseph A. Day:

Honourable senators, let me congratulate the Honourable Senator Marshall on that presentation and also to thank her and congratulate her on the work she is doing on the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance. She has been a very welcome and capable addition to our committee.

Honourable senators, this is second reading of Bill C-47. This bill was referred to the House of Commons on November 4 and was received by us in the Senate on Tuesday, December 7 of this year, which is several days ago.

Normally, honourable senators, we would go through second reading; it would then be referred to our committee and our committee would commence its study at committee, and we would report back at third reading. However, this is one of those special cases where we anticipated that it would be late coming to us. Senator Comeau took the initiative, with our consent, to allow us to do a pre-study of this particular bill. We have in fact started the pre-study, honourable senators, on Bill C-47. On November 16, we had 17 government witnesses from various departments, including Gérard Lalonde, who has come before our committee on several occasions. Mr. Lalonde is of great assistance because he is very knowledgeable on tax policy matters. We thank him for his help.

In addition to tax policy personnel, we had the Human Resources personnel, HRSDC; we had the Canada Border Services Agency; and we had representatives of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. All of those individuals came before us to help explain the rather technical aspects of the bill.

Honourable senators, this is almost an omnibus, pick-up-all-those-little-issues type of bill that we see from time to time. They must keep a list of those in the various other financial departments. It is omnibus within those departments and not within the government generally. It deals, honourable senators, with many issues that have been outlined by the Honourable Senator Marshall. I thank Senator Marshall for going through that list. We also heard from the Bank of Montreal financial services personnel, as Senator Marshall indicated.

Once this bill is referred to us, which we anticipate will happen in the next few days, we will be in a position to deal with it on a clause-by-clause basis and to report back here the outcome of that clause-by-clause deliberation.

There is a wide range of different areas. Senator Marshall highlighted the Registered Disability Savings Plan, on which we have had extensive evidence. In the interest of moving forward and having this bill referred to our committee, I propose to deal with my observations of the Registered Disability Savings Plan evidence that we received in the pre-study at third reading.

Senator Marshall talked about charities and the new initiatives. Let me say that many of these initiatives are very positive. Some of them fine-tune programs that have been in existence for a while. For the last two years, we have had the new Tax-Free Savings Account. You put tax-paid money into it but you do not pay tax on the gain in the program. With any new program like this, there are always adjustments that have to be made. In this one, some certain tax avoidance rules had not applied and now Canada Revenue Agency feels they should apply because people were purposely overpaying. They see how it is being taken up and then they are picking up where the gaps are and rectifying them. It is perfectly acceptable and expected, frankly, that they should be doing that.

Honourable senators, there are many other items in this bill and I am wondering why the government has wasted an opportunity. This is a budget implementation bill at a time when unemployment is 2 per cent higher than it was during the last election; at a time when we had a $55 billion deficit last year; and at a time when we lost 200,000 full-time jobs from the economy.

The Honourable Senator Marshall talked about creating employment, but that employment is part-time jobs and many of them are lost. The fact is that there is 2 per cent higher unemployment now than previously.

I ask honourable senators to look at the predictions and the projection of the increased base of our debt. I heard the Minister of Finance recently say, "We should be able to clean this up so we do not have a deficit in four or five years or so." It is the "or so" that is slowly being worked in here now.

If you accept the government's figures, it will be $150 to $200 billion more debt than we had previously. Honourable senators can calculate whatever the interest rate will be on that particular debt, but that will be a lot of money — for example, at 10 per cent, it is $20 billion — that we will not have for other programs.

Collectively, honourable senators, we must work on programs that reduce the annual deficit and avoid repetition of this excessive spending on matters like advertising programs, and so on, and the billions of dollars spent on fake lakes and other expenditures when we know that we cannot afford those particular matters.

That is my only concern about this particular bill, honourable senators, namely, the lack of focus on what would really help the situation that we are in right now.

As the Honourable Senator Marshall has pointed out, there are provisions with respect to shared custody. That is a good idea, but that could have been worked in anywhere. The rollover aspect of the Registered Disability Savings Plan is both good and positive, but where is the focus on some of the issues that will help us with our situation today?

There were some abuses with the employee stock option, so they are trying to deal with those abuses. I have nothing against that, but why is that the big focus at this particular time? There is a capital cost allowance for set-top television boxes. Perhaps that is important to people who buy set-top television boxes to have an accelerated capital cost allowance, but I am worried about the $55 billion deficit that we incurred last year.

There are online notices and another interesting provision here, which is external complaints made to banks. Banks are required to join this new organization, and the government will create regulations. This group oversees complaints and deals with the complaints to the bank, but then the government says that they will also have the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada oversee the overseers. This looks to me like extensive, excessive oversight in a particular area. I do not know from where the impetus or the need for this particular bureaucracy has come; we will have to pursue that at another time.

There was a number of other what is referred to as "non-priority issues," honourable senators, such as equalization payments. If the registered education fund is not used for education purposes, then the growth portion of that becomes taxable because it was not used for education. We have a provision in here that takes up several pages to provide that the federal government can now share that bounty with the provincial governments. That is fine.

Another provision is equalization payments. About two years ago, the government said, with our new formula, if there is a particular province that gets less in equalization sharing than in previous years, we will top it up so that you do not get less. There are provisions in here that say we will do it another year, but we do not want you to think it will be here forever. That is what is in here.

I wanted honourable senators to know what was in here so you can see that there are some worthwhile initiatives that we commend the government for taking action on, but it would have been a lot better if we could have seen some action on the real issues that confront us at this time.

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