Finance committee  Yes, I would agree. The agreement between the federal government and other jurisdictions that was announced in December talks about a phase two where they will discuss the possibility of setting up registries or requiring corporate registries to collect an official ownership. It

Finance committee  Yes. The Transparency International report, called “G20 Leaders or Laggards?”, tries to compare how the different G20 members are doing. Canada, unfortunately is identified as part of the laggards. It's true that this government has clearly indicated in the last two federal bu

Finance committee  There is a global effort to try to address this problem. At this point Canada is a laggard. It's true that other countries may pick up the slack if Canada were to improve its game, but there would be international pressure to bear. I know that when the finance minister has gone t

Finance committee  Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee on the statutory review of the proceeds of crime and terrorist financing act. It's a good thing that the act has built in a periodic review of how it is working because much more needs to be done if the government is serio

International Trade committee  We can't really impose the differential rules on foreign-based e-commerce that we enforce on Canada, but we need to have the same rules. If an Airbnb operation is below the threshold for having to collect and remit GST/HST, then fine, they don't have to. However, more and more A

International Trade committee  The key problem here is not so much where goods are being shipped, because usually sales taxes are applied there. It's where there are services or things such as software, movie rentals, e-books, and so on that the biggest unfair competition takes place. Those services—advertisin

International Trade committee  We're not saying to shut out foreign e-commerce. You can't do that, but at the minimum you need to level the playing field. In Uber's case, for example, Uber drivers were legally required to remit GST if they had an income above a certain level—I think it's $30,000 or something

International Trade committee  Thank you very much for this opportunity to meet with you. My main message is that Canadian e-commerce companies face a huge competitive disadvantage because their big foreign-based competitors are able to compete in the Canadian market without facing any taxes in terms of GST o

Finance committee  We certainly support the call for more extensive public consultations on the whole fairness of the tax system, but we would not support the government's not going ahead with the current proposals, because we do think they are a step in the right direction. That being said, we wou

Finance committee  Yes, there are big advantages. Even going beyond what already exists for small businesses, Canadian taxpayers are already subsidizing the lower small business tax rate by $3.6 billion. Above that, there are additional benefits—probably about $1 billion—that go just to the priva

Finance committee  My point is that this is an important step forward in tax fairness and it should not harm job creation or the economy as a whole. Thank you.

Finance committee  Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this issue. One of the challenges with tax policy is that the wealthy have the most to lose or gain, so they are the most vocal. When governments listen only to them, we end up with a whole lot of tax cuts or a tax policy that exacerbat

Finance committee  We have given more details to the minister's staff, and it's not just political interference that is the issue here. We have ended up with a tax system that treats ordinary taxpayers in one way and rich taxpayers in another. We end up with a completely unfair system in which some

Finance committee  Our report really puts the emphasis on fixing it, and not just on the problems.

Finance committee  We were not reaching a conclusion about those issues. We were simply saying that there were sufficient cases brought forward to our attention that we felt they warranted further investigation. We have encouraged some of the CRA auditors to take their case to the Public Service In