Editor:
Re: As costly as the gun registry, April 17 letters.
Local union leader Phil Halley wildly suggests my private member’s bill requiring financial transparency from unions will cost “perhaps billions” of taxpayers’ dollars in ongoing costs, like the gun registry once did.
Halley’s rhetoric is misinformed. Costs to unions and to the federal government will in fact be quite minimal. There are no requirements for unions to pay for an audit – they will simply file this data, just as you and I file our own tax return.
It is important to remember that union bookkeepers already collect the financials identified in my bill, and it is simply a matter of using computer software to compile and file these figures.
Upon receiving the data, the government simply and inexpensively posts it on a website, just as the financials for Canadian charities have been published for the last 35 years.
Transparency hasn’t cost the government or charities ‘billions’ and it won’t cost unions much either.
However, the modest cost that is incurred will be far outweighed by the benefits of transparency as Canadian taxpayers see how the roughly half-billion dollars they provide to support the work of unions annually are spent. That is probably why, according to a recent Nanos poll, 83 per cent of Canadians agree with requiring union financial disclosure.
My website – www.C377.ca – has more information on the benefits of union financial disclosure.
MP Russ Hiebert, South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale