Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Elmwood—Transcona addressed the main issue to which I had already spoken, which is what the objective is of this bill. What do we want to do when we engage in tax treaties with countries like Turkey, Greece and Colombia? We need to have an objective. What is our strategy?
I hear the minister for war and peace in the Middle East saying that we need to have a strategy. I do not know what the strategy of the government is. When our government engaged in a tax treaty like this, it had very specific objectives and tactics in place, which were to stimulate increased activity, to attract companies to those places and to invite companies from those countries to the Canadian environment. We tabulated specifically over a five and ten year period the amount of increased economic activity that would be governed by this kind of legislation.
I, too, am as surprised as the member for Elmwood—Transcona is that the parliamentary secretary could not give him an indication or even a ballpark number. If the member looks at the estimates and the budget, he will find the line that indicates other sources of income from the Government of Canada and he will see that it goes into the hundreds of millions of dollars as opposed to the $250 billion that is part of the budget.
The member can then divide those three countries by 80 and come up with his own figures because I am not sure the government knows, which is why it did not write them down. Not only that, it does not care.