Colleagues, thank you for the opportunity to speak before you on my private member's bill, Bill , requiring public financial disclosure by labour organizations.
I was first motivated to introduce legislation in the area of transparency as I examined some of the actions our Conservative government has taken since taking office in 2006. Among the legislation we've introduced as a government, our bill requires greater transparency for public office holders, for crown corporations, and, most recently, for native reserves.
However, I was surprised to learn that despite the massive federal public benefits for labour organizations and their dues payers provided through the Income Tax Act, there was no requirement to be accountable to the public for the use of those benefits. As you know, labour organizations, which collect between $3 billion and $4 billion a year in dues, operate free from tax on such things as profits on investments, revenue from employers, and training centre profits. Their members receive full income tax deductibility for their dues payments, and they receive their strike pay tax-free. Dues deductibility alone costs the federal treasury in the range of about $500 million a year.
As I stated in the second reading debate, labour organizations play a valuable role in Canadian society, and that is why we provide those benefits. However, I believe that because the public is providing such a substantial benefit, it should know how that benefit is being used. After all, charities, which also receive substantial benefits from taxpayers, have been publicly reporting on their finances for the past 35 years, since 1977.
As I looked around at our largest trading partners—the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France—I found that public financial disclosure for labour organizations has long been a fact of life. Indeed, some of my colleagues may be surprised to learn that for Canadian labour organizations that were founded as branches of U.S. unions, my bill is not news at all. That's because under the U.S. legislation, which was written way back in 1959, any union headquartered in the United States must also report on its foreign subsidiaries, which means, for example, that if a Canadian wants to know details about the leader of the United Steelworkers in Canada, that person could easily search the U.S. labour department website and discover the salary and expenses of that individual, along with information about how he allocates his time. The U.S. report tells us that in 2011, for instance, that particular labour leader spent one-third of his time on representational activities, one-third on administration, and one-third on political activities.
Bill will ensure that the Canadian public, including union members and retired former union members, will have similar comprehensive information about the spending of Canadian unions regardless of where they are headquartered.
One of the predominant concerns or questions raised by union leaders has to do with the cost of complying with the legislation. Some have suggested the cost will be high. However, I can assure you that unions are going to find the cost of complying with this legislation very modest, and I can use some recent history to demonstrate that this is the case.
When the U.S. labour department started to enforce more detailed public filing requirements for U.S. labour organizations—requirements that are similar to mine—about a decade ago, they also required the unions to report the cost of compliance. Perhaps not surprisingly, U.S.-based unions initially made the same complaint—that it was going to cost them a lot to comply with the disclosure requirements—but once the filing started to come in, it turned out that the costs were in fact very minimal. That's really not surprising if you think about it. We live in an age of electronic bookkeeping, and much of the information my bill requires is information that any responsible organization is already tracking.
For many unions the only expense they might incur in complying with this bill is for a software upgrade. Some smaller locals have suggested that requiring many pages of filing is going to be burdensome for them. Again I say no. If a local has not engaged in spending in several of the categories listed in my bill, then what could be simpler than entering a zero on those pages of the filing? Remember, Canadian unions with U.S. headquarters are already collecting and publicly disclosing this information in the United States.
Further, I would remind the committee that the bill makes no requirement that the filing be audited. Therefore, a union does not need to incur an outside expense for an audit.
As for the cost to the Government of Canada, I believe there will be some work to do on CRA's part in making the filings available in an easily searchable database on its website. However, it's important to remember that the CRA has much experience with the publishing of filings already, as it has been doing so with charities for 35 years and, in recent years, using its website. This is really not new for the CRA at all.
I believe the cost to unions will not be significant and is a distraction from the more fundamental issue of transparency and accountability. Labour organizations need to be accountable for the substantial public benefits they and their members receive. My bill does not tell unions how to spend their money or restrict them in any way; it only requires transparency so that the public can see how that money was spent.
As you know, Bill received approval in principle from the House at second reading, despite almost hysterical opposition from some members of the NDP. It has become apparent why the NDP doesn't want transparency from labour organizations; they don't want Elections Canada and others to know when they've been taking illegal donations from unions to fund their party. Under my bill, full financial disclosure will make it an awful lot harder to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal union contributions to the NDP.
Regardless, the second reading vote does not mean that the bill as it's currently written cannot be improved. Over the last several months, I have listened carefully to the concerns raised by MPs from all parties, as well as interested groups and individuals, and it's clear to me that some modest amendments are necessary to improve the bill.
I believe it's possible to achieve these improvements without compromising the intent and purpose of my bill, which is to ensure that the public has a comprehensive picture of how labour organizations are spending their money. As such, I would encourage the committee to consider a number of amendments to the bill.
One amendment would be to ensure privacy for the identity of individuals receiving health care, pension, or other types of benefits under a registered benefit plan. A second would be to reiterate and reinforce the confidentiality of solicitor-client privilege. A third would be to avoid publishing home addresses of individuals, even when their names are required to be published. In the case of police officers, I believe these amendments will also meet their special needs to have their personal information protected from criminal elements.
Another amendment would change the requirement for—quote—“a record” of the amount of time that directors, employees, and others spend on lobbying and other political activities. It would be changed to “an estimate” of the time provided. To clarify, the term “record” may be interpreted as requiring keeping an hourly log, and I'm not interested in creating red tape for hard-working labour leaders. Instead, a reasonable estimate of the time spent on such activities would provide useful information.
Another concern that was brought to me is that the bill's definition may have had the unintended consequence of capturing certain benefit-paying institutions, such as pension or health care funds. I would encourage the committee to consider an amendment to the definition of “labour trust” that would clarify that pension, health care, and related benefit firms are not captured by the reporting requirements of my bill.
To reiterate, colleagues, it's not the purpose of my bill to impinge on the privacy of individual Canadians. The purpose of my bill is to disclose union spending. I appreciate your attention to improving this bill through amendments.
Finally, I want to respond to the suggestion from some that this bill is somehow anti-union. On the contrary, this bill is the most pro-union legislation to be tabled and moved forward in Parliament in many years. Union members and retired union members, like the general public, want to know how union money is being spent. Eighty-three per cent of Canadians say they want to see financial transparency, according to a recent Nanos survey. Many unions are already publicly disclosing, but because of a U.S. law, not a Canadian one.
While a handful of union leaders may be uncomfortable with the idea of public disclosure right now, in time the public will see that the large majority of Canadian unions are using their resources wisely and efficiently. As this fact becomes apparent, a positive image of labour organizations as fiscally responsible will be promoted, just as it happened when charities became more accountable 35 years ago.
This legislation will give unions a solid public image and give union members, retirees, and all Canadians the information and confidence in unions they want to have. That's why I say that Bill is pro-union.
Therefore, despite the opposition of a handful of union leaders and some of their friends in the opposition parties, I would encourage you, going forward, to see this bill as something that Canadians, including unionized workers and their families, support.
Thank you for your attention.
I'm pleased to answer your questions.
Thank you for coming to give us a short presentation, Mr. Hiebert. As I listen to you, my impression is of a sick patient whom someone has desperately tried to treat with band-aids. Unfortunately, that generally does not cure people, however many band-aids you apply.
My impression is that your bill is badly written and that there are some fundamental holes in it. If we were in school, I would return the copy to the student and tell him not to hand in a rough draft. There are a number of aspects that you have not thought of. The bill has great potential for collateral damage and for a number of failures. It also intrudes into people's lives a great deal.
I wonder if you are aware of the disastrous effects your bill could have on our economy.
[English]
Mr. Hiebert, did you think about the disastrous impact that this bill could have on pension plans and, as a result, on our financial markets?
In general, this seems to be a sloppily written bill with an area of unintended consequences.
Let's talk about how the $5,000 reporting mechanism will have an impact on labour trusts, investment firms, and the financial markets. Since the bill requires the public disclosure of previously private contracts, labour trusts will be effectively unable to engage in private equity investments. As a result, how large a shift of labour trust capital out of private equity agreements and venture capital do you expect the bill to result in?
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
I'm one of the 500,000 men and women who make their living in one of Canada's biggest and most important industries, the building and construction trades. Shortly put, we build the nation.
We've had a number of fairly important and I think shared concerns with the current Government of Canada dealing with energy, pipelines, nuclear, natural resource extraction, and looking after Canadian veterans. We've been a pretty reliable partner on that with industry and with government.
We would like to build a stronger Canada. What we said we were going to do on that subject with you, we have done. We have done it through regulatory reform, through the pipeline debates, and through Bill We think the current private member's bill will make a lot of our members question why we would bother to try to work with the Government of Canada. I'm here to ask you not to make a mistake.
We're about putting people to work. What's at stake here is the use of the taxation power of the Government of Canada to punish a perceived enemy that a number of people think has never supported us since Confederation.
Let me put the argument on a higher plane. If the dues paid by a union member are moneys deducted from income prior to tax being paid, then union dues are taxpayer-funded. This premise is wrong, both in law and in logic: the union member gets the tax break, not the union, but let me indulge this for a moment without conceding the point.
If the public policy principle is that if the taxpayer funds it, then the taxpayer gets to know about it, look at your own return when you file it. Line 212 of the income tax return provides for annual union, professional, or like dues. They may be deducted in order to calculate net income. This should apply to doctors, lawyers, veterinarians, engineers, human resource professionals, and a host more, because those sorts of organizations are funded by tax dollars. If they are funded by tax dollars, why would they not be required to disclose, if this is solid public policy?
There are thousands of employer organizations in this country. There are thousands of other not-for-profit, industry-based advocacy organizations that are funded by dues deducted from pre-tax income of corporate Canada. This must of course mean that they are funded by tax dollars. If it is sound public policy to require unions to disclose, why would they not be required to disclose?
The mother of all tax breaks is the 75% of the first $350 we get from our political donations, and that is actually a tax credit for tax paid. The mandate of political parties is to nominate candidates, to set out platforms, to elect leaders—one of whom will eventually become the prime minister of the country—and to affect the country. If political parties are funded by tax dollars, are they required to disclose? The answer is yes, but it is a simple financial statement. There is no breakdown. It is all aggregated data. There is nothing that will tell you what someone has done.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members.
I am pleased to be here today on behalf of the Canadian Bar Association. The CBA is a national association representing over 37,000 lawyers from across Canada. The association's primary objectives include improvement in the law and in the administration of justice, and it is with this perspective that we have examined Bill . It's important to note as well that the CBA not only has regional representation but also tries to ensure that different perspectives are taken into account.
I am the chair of the national pension and benefits law section. We try to ensure that our executive not only has members from across the country but also has individuals who represent different types of clients. We have members on our executives who represent corporate interests, who represent pension funds, who are in-house at pension plans or consulting firms, and who represent members.
The submissions that were put before you have been supported and drafted by all members of our executive committee. Having looked at the bill, the CBA submits that the bill should not be passed into law due to a number of concerns, which are set out more fully in our written submissions.
We have highlighted four primary concerns. We have already heard some discussion about some of those earlier today. One overriding concern we have is a constitutional law concern. The Canadian charter enshrines and protects Canadians' freedom of expression and freedom of association. Bill C-377 would impose upon labour organizations and labour trusts, both defined terms under the bill, very substantive and, some would say, onerous reporting requirements and detailed statements.
These are not, as we've heard earlier, the same as those with respect to charities. These are not aggregate amounts that need to be reported; the way the bill is currently framed would require that information about transactions be recorded, including payer, payee, the purpose of the transaction, and a description of the transaction itself.
To the extent that this in any way places a restriction on individual Canadians' freedom of expression and freedom of association, the CBA believes that such a restriction would place the bill at risk of a charter challenge. Also the bill itself does not, on its face, set out a justification for these infringements.
Secondly, the CBA has in our submissions highlighted a number of privacy concerns. Since, under the bill, details such as payer, payee, names, and addresses would need to be reported, and to the extent that the bill requires the reporting and making publicly available of details of salary benefits for all officers, directors, trustees, and employees, we believe that it would infringe upon privacy concerns and existing privacy laws.
The bill also requires the disclosure of some of the most sensitive information relating to individual Canadians' political activities and beliefs, and again we believe that's inappropriate.
We're deeply concerned about this private member's bill and its many disturbing provisions. We're so concerned that we think this legislation should be withdrawn. I'll briefly touch on some of our objections, all of which are detailed in our submission to the committee.
We strongly believe that Mr. Hiebert's unnecessary bill would create more bureaucratic red tape that will be very expensive for our government, pension plans, investment managers, health and benefit plans, and labour organizations to administer. It will significantly intrude on the privacy of a large number of our members, as well as on the privacy of many other individuals who are not union members and on the privacy of their families.
We also believe it's unconstitutional and that it offends both federal and provincial privacy laws. Despite our differences, as Bob Blakely said, we've successfully worked with the government on a wide range of issues, and not once in my career of 30 years has a government minister or a representative raised concerns about accountability with us—not once. When Mr. Hiebert introduced his bill, he told reporters that he had not received a single complaint from a union member that he or she could not get financial information from their union. There's a good reason for that.
In the six provinces and the federal government where there this legislation is governing the provision of financial information to union members, there were in 2010-11 a grand total of six complaints filed with labour boards, all of which were resolved. This represents six complaints out of 4.2 million union members in Canada.
The reporting requirements in Mr. Hiebert's bill will intrude right into the medicine cabinet of many Canadian families. His bill flies in the face of long-held conservative principles of less intrusion by government, budget reduction, and less bureaucracy. I think it's ironic that this very government got rid of the long form census on the basis of intrusion into an individual's privacy—asking how many toilets you have in your house—yet this bill does exactly that in a much more intrusive manner.
This is why, Chairman, dozens of pension plan managers, investment fund managers, and benefit plan administrators have advised us that they oppose this legislation. To implement Mr. Hiebert's bill, the government will have to invest in costly systems—not uncostly systems, but costly systems—capable of processing tens of thousands individual reports containing thousands of separate transactions.
Who is promoting this bill and where is the support coming from? Why do they want the information that this bill provides? Who is behind it? You don't have to look hard to see Merit Canada, an organization that does not even release the names of its board members and that has four lobbyists on the Hill today lobbying on this bill. There's the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which is, I might add, a non-profit organization just like us that issues tax receipts for its members' fees. There's the National Citizens Coalition, which holds no annual general membership meetings and provides no financial statements to its members. There's LabourWatch and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. These are all the same people wearing two or three hats at the same time. They work very hard to destroy what we've accomplished. We know these groups.
The few MPs promoting this bill don't like us. They have a track record to indicate and prove that fact, but it's important to note that none of these organizations, which enjoy tax-free status and lobby the government on an ongoing basis, are very transparent at all. Not a single one of them would agree to share the information publicly, yet they want you to gather that from us. In fact, Merit Canada was until recently in violation of the legislation requiring it to report to the industry minister himself.
There are going to be a lot of unintended victims of this bill: people who are on disability plans, a person in the same benefit plan as a union member, businesses, commercial enterprises that have contracts with us. All of them will have private information posted on a public database. This is information employers cannot obtain from plan carriers because of privacy legislation.
In summary, this bill is seriously flawed legislation that is unnecessary. It's bureaucratic, it's discriminatory, and, I might add again, it's unconstitutional. I strongly encourage you to review the wide range of organizations opposing this legislation.
In conclusion, if there is a real concern about the deductibility of professional fees and union dues or tax receipts issued by non-profit organizations, I'd like to reiterate my wish that the government discuss it directly with all sectors of Canadian society that are treated similarly and equally under the Income Tax Act. Then, working together, it may be possible to come to a reasonable solution regardless of our views on specific issues.
I do need to add, Mr. Chair and committee members, with respect, that how we deploy our financial and staff resources is frankly none of your business. Our members have told us they don't want their bosses to have access to this information in order to use it against them.
Our policies and our budgets are set by our owners. We call them “members”; they're shareholders in the private sector. We're democratic, our conventions are open to the public, we're transparent to our members, and our decision-making is not the business of the government, our bosses, or anti-union organizations.
This private member's bill will set terribly bad policy if it's adopted, and I urge you to reject it.
:
Thanks very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the members of the committee.
I'm director of labour and employment studies at San Francisco State University. I'm going to talk about the U.S. experience with this type of legislation.
I would like to mention that I don't believe the U.S. is the centre of the universe. I was born in the U.K. Before coming back to California I taught for nine years in the department of management at the London School of Economics. I did graduate work in Canada, but here I think the U.S. experience is very instructive and gives rise to serious concerns about both the cost and the benefits of this type of legislation.
I would like very briefly to make three points. First, I believe very strongly in union transparency and accountability; however, what we have seen in the U.S., particularly under the last Bush administration, which introduced the detailed financial reporting that this bill is based upon, was not real transparency. It was an attempt to politicize regulatory enforcement in the name of transparency.
Second, contrary to what has been stated before, I think there's absolutely incontrovertible evidence that the costs of these new regulations for both government and for unions are very substantial, and I will come back to that point.
Third and finally, I think there's no evidence whatsoever that these detailed financial statements have provided any useful service to ordinary union members. I think the only groups that have used them were the very groups that were pushing for them in the first place, and those have been groups that have a political agenda to weaken unions and to use this information against unions, albeit often in a misleading and distorted way.
First of all, in terms of the attempt to politicize regulatory enforcement in the name of transparency, as has been said about the Canadian legislation, there's absolutely no evidence ordinary union members were pushing for these detailed financial disclosures in the United States. However, there's considerable evidence that groups with a separate political agenda to weaken unions were the very ones were pushing for it, and I'll simply quote from one politician, Newt Gingrich, whom I'm sure you are familiar with. He said that a future Republican administration must impose increased financial reporting requirements. He said, “It will weaken our opponents and encourage our allies”. That's exactly what the Bush administration did in 2000 when it came to power.
The costs associated with these new reporting requirements are very substantial. The costs to the government in terms of processing these forms are a minimum of $6.5 million per year. These figures are from the Federal Register from the Department of Labor. This is under a system in which we have had 60 years of experience. The division of the Department of Labor that does this has been established all that time, and we know how to do this, so if you're talking about establishing an entirely new division and using government resources to train unions in how to comply with the reporting, there's reason to believe it will be significantly more than that.
In the United States about 29,000 labour organizations file these reports. They only apply to private sector unions, not to wholly public sector organizations, as I believe is the case in Canada.
Importantly, the major cost is the filing of the so-called LM-2 forms, which require the itemizing of expenditures of $5,000 or more. In the U.S. these apply only to labour organizations with revenues over $250,000 per year. We have much simpler forms for smaller organizations. There's a separate form for organizations with revenues between $10,000 and $250,000 a year and a separate form for organizations with revenues under $10,000 a year.
This is not the case in Canada. In Canada everyone will be submitting the more detailed forms, and this is what incurs the costs, both to government and to the unions.
The costs to the unions are very substantial. The Department of Labor estimates the cost of complying with the LM-2 forms, which are the types that are under consideration with this bill, to be $116 million in the first year, $83 million in the second year, $82 million in the third year, and so on.
We also have a very extensive academic survey conducted by scholars at Cornell University and Pennsylvania State University of over 100 national and international unions in the United States. In my submitted comments, I'll summarize the findings.
Simply, one of the findings is—
:
Thanks very much for the opportunity. I'm Dan Kelly, the president of CFIB.
I'm here to speak in favour of this piece of legislation and to give you a little bit of an understanding of how this would work from our perspective.
There's been a lot of discussion about whether what's good for the goose is good for the gander—whether groups that are not-for-profit associations, advocacy groups for taxpayers, small business owners, or business owners of any sort should be subject to the same kinds of provisions. However, there is one important principle, one important difference that needs to be spoken about with respect to this legislation that targets unions and the spending of unions, and that is the voluntary nature of membership fees.
We in most associations, and certainly in my association, have completely voluntary membership fees. If a member of ours, a small business owner and a member of CFIB, at any given point in time feels that my spending, our spending, is inappropriate or has questions or doubts about that in any way, they can quit the next day.
In Canada, because of the Rand formula, that is impossible. You are required by law to pay union dues whether or not you want to be a member.
I accept that most union members likely want to belong to the union and support the union that they're a part of. I don't take any issue with that. However, I will say that because legislation in Canada, legislation that is largely unprecedented in the world these days, gives unions massive powers to collect dues from those who may not wish to belong, then additional sets of responsibilities should be taken to address them to ensure that those—perhaps few—members who don't want to belong and don't want to pay dues are able to get as much information as they can to inform their thinking about the organization they are funding.
We have 109,000 members across Canada. All of them are completely voluntary. We are a non-partisan organization, we work with all political parties at all times, we don't endorse candidates in any fashion, and we don't accept government funding. I'm really pleased to hear that some of our organized labour colleagues are joining our call for reduced red tape and paperwork, but I have to note that it is largely the first time I've ever heard this. Most of the time most organized labour organizations are pushing for additional regulation, additional red tape for business on a day-to-day basis.
Somehow Canadians have convinced themselves that we are in the mainstream of union legislation around the world, that Canada is perhaps somewhere between the U.S. and Europe, but nowhere in Europe right now are employees who work in a unionized environment required to pay union dues. In Canada they are. Again, with that, additional responsibilities are due to the union members and to the public by an additional level of disclosure.
We do have a suggestion, though. If a union is uncomfortable with this legislation, perhaps there could be an exemption made for those unions that decide to make their union memberships and union dues voluntary. Perhaps then they wouldn't need to be subject to this additional standard. If that were able to be changed, certainly we would support that.
Thanks very much.
I think you're correct, sir, in observing that our interest as the Taxpayers Federation is more general than that of the other parties around the table. We take a principled stance against boutique tax credits—special writeoffs for children's hockey, political parties, oil and gas exploration, for example. If it were up to us, we would have more of an Alberta solution. We'd throw most of the Income Tax Act into the trash heap, and bang it right down as low as possible. Treat everyone equally. That's been our long-standing view.
In fact, political parties have the richest tax credit treatment. I won't take too much time to say this. I'll just say it quickly and let you know it's a scandal that political parties have far richer tax treatment on contributions than the Diabetes Association, the Heart Foundation, or the Cancer Society. It's a scandal, and it shows you that the politicians, not the charities, are running the tax system.
We believe there ought to be treatment for labour organizations analogous to charities. To pick up on what Dan Kelly of the CFIB mentioned, if Parliament wishes to extend the Rand formula.... The average donation to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation was $140 last year. We had over 20,000 donations, in rough numbers, so if you wish to enrol the other 24 million Canadian tax filers into our organization and expand our revenue to $3.5 billion, a thousandfold expansion in our revenues, we could get around this whole problem of having to get people to voluntarily give us money. For $3.5 billion we might have a look at buying into the disclosure requirements that are being discussed here.
We don't believe in compulsion. We wouldn't want to force people to give us money; that's why we don't accept government funds, that's why our donations are not tax-deductible, and that's why we enjoy the freedom to let our arguments speak for themselves and to conduct our business as a voluntary organization.
:
The study was a very large-scale study of union administrative practices in general. As I said, one of the main findings with regard to reporting and disclosure was overwhelmingly that unions were spending more time on compliance and less time on other duties.
Of them 38%, for example, had to significantly change their accounting practices, 29% had to hire external consultants to comply with the new requirements, and 19% had to hire additional staff to comply with the new requirements. The cost involved for these organizations was very substantial.
This, keep in mind, was simply the cost of compliance with the new Bush regulations that were introduced only for organizations with revenues above $250,000 per year. They would apply to all Canadian labour organizations regardless the level of their revenues. This is time and money paid for by ordinary union members.
As I said, there was never any evidence presented that union members were pushing for this in the first place. There was never any evidence to demonstrate that they received any benefit whatsoever from it afterwards.
We do know something about what union members want from their unions. Harvard economist Richard Freeman has written a very good book called What Workers Want. They want information in very broad terms. They want to know that the union has more money coming in than it has going out. They want to know broadly where it comes from and where it goes to.
The types of revisions instituted during the Bush administration and now being proposed in Canada do not provide them with the kind of information they want. It's not in a useful form. There has never been any evidence that it has actually been used by ordinary union members in the United States.
However, as I said, there is very substantial evidence that it has been used by organizations who have an agenda, who want to weaken unions politically and in other ways. One of the organizations that has used this information most in the United States is the Center for Union Facts, a right-wing organization that lobbies against unions in general and has an agenda to try to undermine unions, politically and otherwise. If it—
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the witnesses, as well, for being here.
I am going to start off by correcting the record, for anyone who is confused. This is not a government bill. This is a private member's bill that I am happy to discuss.
I am a proud member of the Winnipeg Police Service. I have been a union member for almost 19 years, and I have heard concerns about this many times. I am very happy that Mr. Hiebert has addressed the concerns Mr. Mai brought up by proposing that amendments be made. I am happy to hear that.
I intend to return to a unionized workplace when I am done here in politics, so I have what you would call skin in the game. I want to make sure that as we're discussing this with all of you, everything comes out on the table.
Mr. Georgetti, I'm sorry, but I have to correct some of the things you said. You said that there have been no problems with regard to unions and perhaps some of their accounting practices. Most recently, and you are well aware of this, there were illegal contributions made by unions to NDP conventions in the amount of over $340,000. They were caught.
This is something that is very well known. It is something that has caused angst for me, as a former union member, and for you and your union members, because it's not right. It doesn't fall within the parameters, and it was deemed illegal.
Other suggestions that there are no other complaints are also not correct, Mr. Georgetti. Let me just point out, if you would allow me to, through you, Chair, something that really is disturbing. There was a unionized worker who spent thousands of dollars, and there have been several of them, trying to battle their own unions to get information from their accounts. Let me read from Chris Vander Doelen. He is a CAW member.
And as a member of the CAW myself, I've had my own ideological hankering for years to know exactly where my dues are being spent, any time I want, without asking.
Under the current system, rank and file union members rarely hear financial disclosures of any kind, or have to go, cap in hand, begging to their local for what should be a basic right.
There is another one. In B.C., the United Food and Commercial Workers union fought their workers in multiple labour relations board and court hearings in a bid to deny them five years of financial statements. The case raged on for years. When it was finally decided in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, it came to light that the financial statements for 2002 through to 2007 weren't even compiled until the end of 2007 and early 2008.
I just want us to be very honest as we are discussing this. Yes, we have concerns, and absolutely, I'm glad that we're in a setting where we can make amendments, and we are looking for your advice on this aspect.
Mr. Thomas, you have some knowledge about the case in B.C., I believe. Is that accurate?