Finance committee  Again, I did not write any of the papers on that issue, but there was an issue of the Canadian Tax Journal which looked at exactly that question. They surveyed households, and households were happy to get it. If you want to give households a cheque, we're all happy to get that, but households said that they were going to do those things anyway, that essentially they were getting paid to put their kids into hockey or ballet or what have you, and those are all things that families do.

Finance committee  Oh, absolutely. You could just lower income tax rates, particularly at the low end. You could increase the universal child care benefits. You could increase HST rebates. You could do it all in one thing, rather than a little bit here and a little bit there, and trust families to do the right thing, because Canadian families care about their kids.

Finance committee  I think the first example was the whole iPod tax debate. We have these items, and the question became whether a television or an MP3 player is a piece of consumer electronics or is considered a computer part, which comes under a special tariff treatment. Depending upon what the answer is, there is a different tariff rate, and nobody was really quite sure.

Finance committee  It's more a problem for Canadian households. I would like to start by applauding the government for taking the initiative to cut red tape. As a business owner, I highly appreciate that, economic analysis aside. It's more a problem for households. Again, you're forcing households to save a bunch of receipts and then at the end of the year collect them all and fill out these various tax forms.

Finance committee  Thank you for having me here today. My name is Mike Moffat. I'm a business owner, a chief economist with the Mowat Centre, and an assistant professor at the Ivey Business School in London, Ontario. Those are a lot of hats, but I'm here representing my own views. I'm here today to talk about tax policies and regulatory burdens.