Okay, so we have provisions in the legislation that allow us to charge interest when people are negligent, late, et cetera. I mean, I know Revenue Canada has these kinds of provisions and is quick to use them. I would imagine that it is (a), lucrative for the federal government and (b), sends a pretty clear message to people who are late in remitting that the government is serious about doing it.
If we have the provision in our legislation, but in fact we do not really do it, I wonder what kind of a message we send to employers. I would tend to think that if somebody has to let some bills go and be negligent on something, this would be the one to be negligent on, because if you can remit eight months at a time, or let these things slide, then I really do not know how serious we seem to employers who are out there, especially some of these operations who come up to work for six months and may not be aware of the payroll tax and then leave again.
I would think that people would become much more aware if there were penalties for skipping remitting the payroll tax. In the past, I have made mention that I thought the payroll tax should probably be raised so that employers would take it seriously and we could generate a significant amount of revenue from some of these companies that come in and operate for short periods of time and then head back to the south, that are not really located in the North, or employees who fly up here to work and then leave again.
I would think with the recent census data coming out, showing that maybe we have assumed that all this economic activity has meant that there are a lot more people in the Northwest Territories, maybe it is not such a revelation that a lot of this activity might be fly-in/fly-out. I think it might be time for this Minister to reassess his options when it comes to the payroll tax and start to look at some of the things that have been run up the flagpole in the past but dismissed for various reasons.
I guess my point is that I am not convinced that we take our payroll tax seriously and therefore that anybody else does. I hope the Minister would be amenable to taking a look at our strategy here. I think it is important for us to figure out what we are trying to do. We should not just have a 1 percent payroll tax because we have had it and we have set up the administration. There should be an end goal here, something we are trying to achieve. Thank you.