Article content continued

Managers were taking nearly a year on average to investigate

At a committee meeting in March, Progressive Conservative MP Goldie Ghamari asked assistant deputy minister Richard Steele why the ministry wasn’t routinely checking immigration statuses with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. “What has to happen now is that individual requests … have to get faxed to IRCC,” he said. “Faxed?” Ghamari responded. “Yes, faxed,” Steele confirmed.

Lisa MacLeod, Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, has been working with the federal government on a plan to electronically flag people who are slated for deportation, so that taxpayers are no longer paying for failed refugee claimants. That seems like a no-brainer, and it should have happened years ago.

Photo by Chris Young/THE CANADIAN PRESS

Journalists tend to scoff when Premier Doug Ford when he says he can find enough “efficiencies” to close the $15 billion deficit left by the Liberals without cutting frontline services or raising taxes. After all, he long claimed that he and his brother, former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, claimed to have found $1 billion worth of efficiencies in the City of Toronto’s budget — a number that was, to put it mildly, generous. Still, the auditor general has shown that getting serious about fraud would help get the province get a lot closer to balanced books.

Small businesses that hide their sales from the taxman are one of the biggest sources of unaddressed fraud. Statistics Canada puts the underground economy nationwide at $51.6 billion, with residential construction, retail and hospitality making up more than half. Quebec has found a relatively simple way of cracking down, at least in bars and restaurants: tamper-proof “sales recording modules” connected to debit machines and cash registers that track every sale. SRMs have been required in Quebec restaurants since 2011 and in bars since 2016. Revenu Québec said last year that it had recovered $2.1 billion in otherwise hidden taxes as a result of the program. Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals passed a law last spring to require “electronic cash registers,” which would have served the same purpose. They estimated the rule, which has not yet come into force, would catch $500 million per year. Finance Minister Victor Fedeli, who was PC critic at the time, framed the requirement as just more red tape for business owners. Now the government refuses to rule out going ahead with the idea, which is a smart one.