Finance committee  Harmonized sales tax definitely would, because you would eliminate the distortion that was referred to earlier in which one province has higher sales tax than another so that trade moves one way. If every province had the exact same sales tax rate, if you could ever get to that

Finance committee  I was just going to make a comment that a tremendous percentage of the EU subsidies to Ireland are in the agricultural field, so if you're talking corporate taxes and comparing them, or increased productivity, economic growth, and economic subsidies, or subsidies from the EU, I t

Finance committee  From a basic competitive position, if the tax in a particular jurisdiction on a particular good or service is all the same and the compliance costs of collecting that tax are quite reduced, competition should naturally take its own course. I'm not sure the federal government is l

Finance committee  At the moment, we do not believe there is any such facility in Canada, at least as far as we've been able to discover. One of the real problems that corporations have is obviously finding in-house training, continuing education programs, things of that nature. We believe that if

Finance committee  We have never specifically taken a look at any EI issues of that nature.

Finance committee  In my personal experience, at least in Nova Scotia, the major benefit of harmonization has been the elimination of red tape, the number of auditors, the number of sales tax returns, etc., virtually all of which gets translated back into the business, especially small businesses.

Finance committee  I'd like to pick up on two points you made in that last presentation. You started off talking about tax havens. A tax haven, by definition, is a jurisdiction where taxes are lower than somewhere else. At the latter part of your presentation you equated tax haven with tax evasion.

Finance committee  I don't have any additional information. However, if we're talking about tax havens generally--and by the way, a number of jurisdictions in Canada are classified as tax havens for international investors--the issue is not whether it's tax evasion, tax avoidance, or whatever. The

Finance committee  Of course, the magnitude of the issue is something we can't discover.