Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Hearing these testimonies today kind of gives me flashbacks to my time as a recovering city councillor.
I'll share with you that it may have been seven or eight years ago when MP Dzerowicz and I were on a delegation to the UN's Habitat III. They were introducing concepts of land value capture and land value tax as a way to combat the regressive nature in which property tax tends to have fluctuations and unpredictability with operating budgets in municipalities.
I'm brought back to that moment and listening with interest to your testimony, sir, around the land value tax. I always get a kick out of hearing Adam Smith quoted outside of his typical contexts, but I do believe that general fairness applies across all economic principles when it's scientifically applied.
I want to go back to that process.
In your opinion, how do you think a land value tax would help with the predictability, fairness and general distribution of cost across municipalities? Reflecting, to the best of your ability, sir, without expecting to be an expert on the matter, the way in which particularly commercial property taxes have been shifted in their way to residential property taxes, how do you feel this would alleviate some of those discrepancies?