Please sign my petition for a full parliamentary review of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) gone rogue.
Join Biblitz and the growing number of Canadians who have signed the petition calling for a full review by Parliament of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), its policies and procedures and the source of its authority. Canada and our trading partners demand immediate assurance that Canada's tax authority operates openly and in full compliance with Canadian law, including assorted constitutional protections.
It's no longer clear whether or who, if any, elected official currently instructs our tax authority. Increasingly, it looks as if CRA has gone rogue.
In the absence of adequate Parliamentary oversight, CRA assessments, audits and investigations may flout legal protections. Increasingly I fear they do. This month alone (December, 2012), CRA cites convictions in which small business operators were actually jailed over a disputed sum more properly the subject of a provincial court small claim. Equally disturbing is the fact that Canadian judges are going along with it. Why? Nothing in the sentencing guidelines under the Criminal Code supports such a Dickensian approach.
Arbitrary inquiries over tax amounts CRA never properly explains place a chill on business and not just in Canada. What about all the new trade agreements and takeovers the federal government has concluded lately? What about Canada's many similar agreements still being negotiated? Who wants to do business in a country with a secret service that has the power to deploy an arsenal of extreme super-remedies against even the smallest debtor before the debt is ever proved or even explained? No economy regardless of management is strong enough to sustain losses resulting from the excesses of an arbitrary, unrestrained tax authority.
Imagine what CRA will become if Canada bows to U.S. pressure to overturn the common-law revenue rule, one of the cornerstones of common law, and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty agrees to enforce not only our own but U.S. tax laws over which Canada has no control? Where will it end?
Please sign my petition calling for a parliamentary frog march of CRA back to democratic principles and the rule of law. Even a humble tax authority in a democracy must operate clearly and openly in the public interest and not against it. Currently ours does not.
Follow our campaign here at Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and at change.org.
Update: VICTORY! Biblitz wins his appeal. Here is CRA's letter of Feb. 27/13 allowing the objection, ending a months-long blizzard of terrifying, terrorizing threatening notices and phone calls:
