Thank you.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

I am the national president of the Union of Taxation Employees.

First of all, I too would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to take part in this discussion today on Bill C-224.

The Union of Taxation Employees is a component of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. We represent around 28,000 employees of the Canada Revenue Agency.

The purpose of the bill introduced by the Bloc Québécois member of Parliament Gabriel Ste-Marie is to have the federal government make the province of Quebec responsible for collecting and administering federal-level personal and business income taxes on behalf of the federal government.

Because the Bloc Québécois is an openly sovereignist party, I can certainly understand the political reasons that prompted him to introduce this bill. However, I can see no other good reasons that would justify passing Bill C-224.

First of all, massive job losses will clearly ensue if this bill is passed and the federal government hands over administration of Quebec's federal taxes to the provincial government. The Canada Revenue Agency currently employs approximately 6,000 people in Quebec, and our union represents about 4,000 of them. Revenu Québec has around 12,000 employees. Together, the two agencies therefore have a total workforce of approximately 18,000 people. If we compare that to the CRA'S total workforce in Canada outside of Quebec, which is about 39,000 employees, it's easy to see that there would be a surplus of employees in Quebec if the bill is passed.

Moreover, as reported in a January 2019 article in the daily Le Devoir, Quebec Premier François Legault believes that there will definitely be job losses. He is also careful to point out that only employees in the group working for Revenu Québec would keep their jobs. I actually don't agree with him, but that's what he said.

I'd like to point out in passing that the vast majority of jobs that would be lost are held by people living in Quebec who pay taxes there and greatly contribute to the province's economic activity. Basically, they are Quebeckers from all over Quebec.

Included in these job losses are more than 1,200 employees in the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean region and 1,500 in Mauricie. The bill calls for measures to be put in place to mitigate the job losses that will be inevitable. While I have been looking for a realistic solution to this problem, I have yet to find one.

Now, I also need to point out that the idea itself of creating a single tax return in Quebec is not the solution, at least not at this time. This is not coming from me. This is according to Quebec tax experts who met in May 2019 in Sherbrooke. According to those experts, the solution is not applicable at this time. They said that international practices would prevent Quebec from being able to do a part of the federal government's work in this area. They also said that the result of bilateral agreements negotiated solely between the central governments, like the Government of Canada and other countries, such as co-operation agreements on, among other things, combatting tax evasion, do not usually allow the data to be shared with other levels of government.

I know that the bill is asking us to look into that, but I want to point out that it took years for the CRA to negotiate these agreements with other countries. It will take a long time, if it can happen and if the other countries agree, to make any changes to these agreements.

In any case, the real problem doesn't lie there. The bulk of the additional cost of tax compliance in Quebec doesn't arise from a redundancy issue, according to François Vaillancourt, a renowned Quebec tax expert. It comes from the tax policy differences between the two levels of government, because there are two tax laws, one provincial and one federal. He said that as long as we have to comply with two different sets of legislation, we cannot hope to achieve such huge savings.

The experts therefore suggest that Quebec and Ottawa harmonize their tax policies before even thinking about creating a single tax measure. According to those experts, if the objective is solely to reduce redundancies and achieve efficiencies, it would be more logical to entrust the work to the agency that is most capable of achieving large-scale savings, namely, the Canada Revenue Agency. I suggest that this is why the nine other provinces are counting on the CRA to do the work.

In its report published in June 2015, the Robillard commission, commissioned by the current government itself, came to the conclusion that transferring the tax administration activities from Revenu Québec to the Canada Revenue Agency would result in direct annual savings of approximately $400 million for the Quebec government.

In our view, if Quebec administers the federal government's taxes in Quebec, it will lose some of its autonomy, since it will have to harmonize many of its tax policies with those of Canada's Income Tax Act. In particular, that will include the definition of income, which is not the same at the federal level as it is in Quebec.

In conclusion, thank you again for the opportunity to speak to you today. I will be pleased to answer any questions committee members may have.

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