Parliament In Review: September 19, 2011

With the start of the fall session of Parliament I'll plan to resume taking a daily look at what happens in the House of Commons - with a particular focus on the stories that don't necessarily make the headlines written about question period.

What You Don't Know...

The first day of the fall session saw a pile of questions on the Order Paper answered by the Cons. But it's hard to imagine the response to any question at any point in the session matching the jaw-dropping reply to #1 for sheer unresponsiveness to what should have been a relatively simple question:

Mr. Bruce Hyer:

With regard to corporate taxation, what is the total amount of deferred corporate taxes for the tax years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010?

Hon. Gail Shea (Minister of National Revenue, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, with respect to the above-noted question, what follows is the response from the Canada Revenue Agency, (CRA).

The CRA is unable to provide a response in the manner requested.

Deferred corporate taxes, reported on corporation’s’ financial statements, are captured in CRA’s CORTAX database. The database is used to capture information from T2 corporate income tax returns and to administer corporate income tax.

However, corporations are able to file amended returns and financial statements to request a reassessment, and this may include a revision to their financial statement data, including deferred income taxes. This type of taxpayer-requested adjustment can initiate changes on multiple tax years. Therefore, there is no definite point at which data can be considered final for any given tax year.

A data analysis of the amounts presently captured in the CRA’s database determined that a representative amount of deferred corporate taxes by tax year cannot be provided.

Needless to say, now may be the time for a few follow-up questions: namely, how on earth can the CRA lack the ability to determine such basic information as how much tax is being deferred at any given time? And what impact does that apparent lack of a clue as to what might be owing have on its ability to actually collect what's owed?

Meanwhile, in reply #46, Leona Agglukaq also helpfully noted that the federal government considers maternal mortality rates to be a "provincial/territorial" matter and thus doesn't bother to collect them. Which surely has nothing to do with her follow-up comment:

Maternal mortality rates among aboriginal populations at the national level are not available due to the lack of ethnic identifiers in provincial-territorial vital statistics databases.

Choose Your Euphemism

Megan Leslie has already pointed out the absurdity of Peter Kent's labeling of job cuts at Environment Canada as meaning only that employees are "separated from the department". But I'm not sure the Cons didn't manage to top that level of disingenuousness by the end of the day: just look at the response to question #20, where Gerry Ritz helpfully pointed out that "483 indeterminate employees...were lost to attrition" by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Similarly, #87 mentions indeterminate employees coming and going from CIDA, and #90 from Natural Resources.

What remains to be determined about the employees...well, remains to be determined.

Meanwhile, those noting a distinct pattern of cuts among federal departments and wondering if it applies across the board should have no fear: at least one federal government employer hired more employees than it eliminated. That of course would be the Privy Council Office, mentioned in answer #77 as having hired 57 more employees than it lost in 2010-2011.

No Refuge

The main legislation debated was the Cons' bill to allow the Minister of Immigration to order that refugees be detained for a year on arrival in Canada. And not surprisingly, the subject gave rise to a few noteworthy moments:
- Dan Davies highlighted how the bill is based on the Cons' fear-mongering rather than any legitimate concern, pointed out the obvious effect that being detained for a year would have on child refugees, and called Rick Dykstra on the gap between the supposed desire to deal with human smugglers and a bill which actually targets refugees;
- Kevin Lamoureux, Jasbir Sandhu and Paulina Ayala all discussed the economic costs of locking refugees up and throwing away the key;
- Francis Scarpaleggia moved to stop the bill in its tracks; and
- Ray Boughen got thoroughly schooled by Randall Garrison after using a somewhat more inflammatory rationale for the bill than the Cons normally admit.

In Brief

Jean Crowder raised the issue of child poverty, with the Cons offering about as much interest as usual in addressing the problem. And Peter Stoffer reintroduced a private member's bill to provide a tax benefit for volunteerism.