Bill S-3 (Historical)

Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2010

An Act to implement conventions and protocols concluded between Canada and Colombia, Greece and Turkey for the avoidance of double taxation and the prevention of fiscal evasion with respect to taxes on income

This enactment implements the most recent tax treaties that Canada has concluded with Colombia, Greece and Turkey.
The treaties implemented reflect efforts to expand Canada’s tax treaty network. Those treaties are generally patterned on the Model Double Taxation Convention prepared by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Tax treaties have two main objectives: the avoidance of double taxation and the prevention of fiscal evasion. Since a tax treaty contains taxation rules that are different from the provisions of the Income Tax Act, it becomes effective only after being given precedence over domestic legislation by an Act of Parliament such as this one. Finally, for each of those tax treaties to become effective, it must be ratified after the enactment of this Act.

Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2010

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Madam Speaker, I want to touch on something I heard in a speech by the member for Burnaby—New Westminster. He talked about the fact that, in signing this treaty, the government of the day would say that even if there are indiscretions in places like Colombia, that does not mean we should not go ahead with signing an agreement. Yet we have been very reticent about signing a free trade agreement with Colombia because of the crimes against labour leaders, workers and indigenous people of that country. The United States and certainly the European Union felt similar concerns.

In light of the behaviour of Colombia in regard to its environment, its people and trade unionists, should we not stand back and say, no, we are not going ahead and signing a tax treaty because that legitimizes the kinds of behaviours we are seeing in Colombia?

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, that is a very good question from the member. I would like to see what these 87 tax treaties have accomplished in the first place. I asked the government that question this morning. Members were not able to give me even one example of their being able to collect some money owed to the government because of tax evasion or tax avoidance. Why would they promulgate more of these agreements when they do not even have results to show for the first 80?

I already suggested that the government should split them off, if it wanted these bills to pass. There are three treaties here. The Conservatives should have introduced one bill for the treaty for Greece, a second bill for the treaty for Turkey and a third bill for the treaty for Colombia. But they introduced all three together under this bill. One wonders why they would do that, given that they should have known there would be questions about this. Clearly they do not want their legislation to go through as smoothly as it could have if they had simply split it up.

Having said that, we would still want to know what sort of results we have obtained from all the other treaties we have signed. Why are we signing treaties if we cannot show any results from the first 80?

The next question is about the treaties themselves. I checked over two separate treaties and they are not the same. Are the Conservatives taking the OECD model and basically adjusting it based on how good the negotiators are with the other countries? I am really at a loss to explain that one.

We have said that, when the bill goes to committee, we will try to make some amendments to it and separate and divide it, but we are not happy with what the government has done and we think members knew in advance the trouble they were going to get into on this bill.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, I enjoy listening to my friend. We all know we have the opportunity to do it often, much to the chagrin of the Liberal member for Mississauga South who is losing out on the count and contributions.

My question actually came from a member of the Liberal Party. Underlying these conversations about an increase in treaties and an increase in fair trade agreements from the government, in previous governments there has been a philosophy and a notion that by signing these agreements, human rights will improve in our trading countries, the environmental regulations will get better and workers' rights will improve. There is sort of this litany of other consequences from signing these trade deals.

My hon. colleague just talked about how the government has not proffered any evidence, one way or the other. Was this trade deal a good trade deal? Did this one not work as effectively? It is partly because the government does not use any measurements of success, other than the signature on the deal. It says that once the deal is inked and signed, that is successful.

That does not make any sense. There would not be a business in this world that would have a contract with another business with the only measurement of success being the contract itself. Of course deals are signed in order to get something done. However, when we ask the government what has been done, it does not offer any evidence and says that it needs to sign more.

I wonder if my friend could comment on this issue because there seem to be concerns coming from the Liberals as well. This is from a previous question by the member for Scarborough Centre who referred to Colombia, Greece and Turkey and resistance with Colombia because of human rights. He said, “Today we have an island called Cyprus. One-third of it is illegally occupied by Turkish forces. There are 1,600 Greek and Turkish Cypriots still unaccounted for with regard to laws, properties, et cetera. If that is not a violation of human rights on behalf of Turkey, what would he say to his Greek Canadian and Greek Cypriot constituents?”

Here we have even Liberal members, which is defying description, raising concerns about these other elements, elements of human rights and elements related to the environment. I wonder if my hon. colleague could comment on the evidence, or lack of evidence, about whether these treaties actually accomplish any of these other benefits.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, 87 treaties have been signed and, from what I can see, only one of them was signed with a country that would be seen as a tax haven, and that is the country of Barbados. Having signed the agreement with Barbados, one would think we would be able to determine, with some degree of accuracy, how much progress we have made in turning around the tax haven status of the island of Barbados.

As the Bloc member pointed out, Bermuda, Barbados and the Cayman Islands had an increase in investment from $30 billion to $90 billion. We do not have tax conventions with Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. If the intention here is to cut off the tax havens, then why do we not go out and try to sign tax treaties with the worst offenders of the tax havens? However, we are not doing that. We are signing them with countries that evidently we do not have a problem with them being tax havens. The minister, if this whole idea was working, presumably in his speech would have singled Barbados out.

He would have said, as the member for Kings—Hants would say, “Well, we signed this agreement with Barbados, and look at the huge improvement we have had in their tax haven status. They have gone from being a tax haven to a non-tax haven”.

That is not what the Bloc member described this morning. The way he described the companies operating in Barbados, they clearly are still operating in a tax avoidance environment, which is not something the government should be trying to emulate.

I think that the government is operating on the basis that this whole agreement structure facilitates trade. If members read the speeches from the senators in the Senate, that is what they would notice in their speeches. It is all about trade and this is just one little piece in that whole idea that we are open for business and let us trade with one another.

It is just lip service being paid to shutting down tax havens. If that were the intention here, there would a different picture being presented in this situation.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Madam Speaker, my colleague is exactly right. We see a government that keeps throwing stuff into bills and budgets that does not make sense. It put in the Navigable Waters Act. It attacked pay equity in the budget. Now it is putting forward a bill that should be two separate bills.

Maybe my colleague could reiterate why it is important to have a bill that would specifically address the issues with regard to Colombia.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, the simple answer is that if the government had a specific bill that dealt only with Colombia, another one that dealt only with Greece and another one that dealt with Turkey, it would get two of the three moved through the House in an expeditious way. That would be the bottom line on it.

Just for a moment I want to deal with the situation in Barbados, which is a tax haven that has an agreement. The Bloc member indicated that to register, people had to have their headquarters there, had to have one meeting a year, had to keep minutes and had to have one director who was a resident and they could pay the director as little as $1,500 a year. This is the way it is set up. There is also banking secrecy.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is encouraging to hear my colleague from Winnipeg talk about the implications of tax policy, with having done so much research on it, because those implications affect so much of what we do in this place, primarily the government's ability and willingness to collect taxes fairly across the country. Are there special understandings within the political class here, the cabinet, and those families that can even afford to even consider things like tax havens?

I suspect that most Canadians watching this have not contemplated with their families around the dinner table what to do with their tax haven structures this year. Most Canadians are struggling to make ends meet and pay their fair share of taxes, and are willing to do so, but it is when they hear stories of the excessively rich families in Canada making a certain amount of money, wanting to avoid taxes and then skipping town, essentially.

Some of these same folks end up getting a little pin on their lapels or the Order of Canada from prime ministers for their great and dutiful work for Canadians. The irony and the hypocrisy in that alone smacks so hard against Canadian values.

Bill S-3 is a bill that has come forward from the Senate. It is great to know that every once in a while the senators rouse themselves from their afternoon naps and produce something. However, it is a bill that does not necessarily mean a lot in its particulars but, in general, has implications for all of us.

In Bill S-3, as my friend from Winnipeg said, the government quite intentionally included a country that may cause problems, because it is trying to do a free trade deal with Colombia right now and now it is slipping it into this taxation bill. It is striking to me and to others why these three particular countries are locked together and why it is of interest to the government to include such diverse economies together into one piece, but the government has chosen to do that so we must work with that.

The issue that is in front of us is how to deal with this bill. The NDP has suggested, quite rightly, that the bill should be split, that it should be broken up into its contingent parts so we can deal with each reality on its own. The government at this point has refused that, but let us look at the pattern of how the government operates when it comes to making legislation and the role of the government.

Right now at the finance committee, members are dealing with Bill C-9, which, by all measures and accounts, is a Trojan Horse bill. It is supposed to be a budget bill but it is an omnibus bill, which means that it includes a whole bunch of different pieces. The government has included things like raising airport taxes and the selling off of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the largest crown corporation in this country. It is the nuclear industry. It has also included a watering down of environmental regulations on, of all things, the oil and gas industry, which is quite ironic to think about doing that right now. All of these things are embedded into a piece of legislation that is meant to be a budget bill, a finance bill. That is a cynical form of politics. It is a form of politics that says that it does not want to debate these things on their merits.

Let us just take one of those pieces as an example, the selling of AECL. Canadians, over the 50 years of this crown corporation existing, have put somewhere north of $21 billion into it to develop the nuclear industry here in Canada, both on the energy side and creating isotopes. That is a lot of money. What else could have been done with $21 billion? However, here we are and the money has been put in.

It actually says in legislation that was crafted in this place that in order to sell or break up AECL, the government must bring a bill before the House for debate. That makes sense. That is reasonable. That is what every other country around the world does. However, rather than debate the sale of AECL or how to break it up, or any of these other things, the government instead has slipped it into a budget bill and has said that it is a matter of confidence.

It also tacked in this thing about raising taxes at airports. This is from a government that is constantly claiming that it is cutting taxes. It is becoming laughable because at the same time it is raising them, like the HST.

I am a member from British Columbia and I was just at our first farmers' market in Terrace, B.C. this weekend. I manned the HST booth for a couple of hours and heard from constituents in British Columbia how frustrated they are that when they flick on the evening news they hear Conservative minister after minister talk about their glorious tax cuts, when they know in British Columbia and in Ontario that they are moving the HST onto the backs of hard-working families who will pay more taxes.

It was a tax that was brought in by a British Columbia premier who promised not to do it. The Conservatives pretend they had nothing to do with it, forgetting that their fingerprints are all over a $1.6 billion bribe that they sent to Ontario. The government took $1.5 billion from taxpayers to bribe another level of government to raise taxes on those same taxpayers. This is the way the Conservative government cuts taxes.

It is unbelievable that those guys can still walk upright and claim the high moral ground on taxation when they took $1.5 billion and slipped it into a budget bill to raise taxes in British Columbia and another $3.5 billion or so to Ontario. That is remarkable.

What is remarkable is that the folks who were coming up to us at this farmers market were from all political persuasions. Folks from across the political spectrum were saying that whether it was this type of tax or another type of tax, the process stunk. They were signing a petition so a free and fair vote could be held in British Columbia to decide things.

Bill S-3 is another effort at talking about things without actually doing anything. We have asked for evidence from the government about the effect of these treaties. The government has signed, I believe, 87 agreements. The Conservatives think they are great free traders because they have signed these agreements. They say that they are fantastic, thereby implying that something actually has changed in the world.

It must have cost a lot of money to print 87 treaties, never mind sending negotiators all over the world to make these things happen. These things are not free. We have invested in these things. We are asking for a return on our investment.

We want to know what has changed in tax policy. Have we caught those folks who take their money offshore to a tax haven? Have we recovered any funds from the people who have earned their money from investments by Canadians and then skipped town before the bill is due? The government has not provided any evidence.

This leads one to some suspicions. This is again the portrayal of action without anything actually changing. This is a level of government of which people are growing increasingly tired. If the government is going to do something, then it should do it.

I come from a remote rural part of northern British Columbia. When somebody says he or she is going to do something, often it is a handshake and the agreement is made. Then we go forth and do it.

To set up all these agreements with no evidence as to whether they work or not, or which kind work better for which situation, is governance by a certain ideology rather than governance by any kind of thoughtfulness and debate.

With this bill, the government is lumping three countries together so it can get the numbers up. It is signing more treaties, all the while refusing a fundamental principle of trade, which has been evolving, growing and maturing around the world for the last 50 years.

That is the counter to the free trade ideology. We can trade with other partner countries but we have to do it fairly. Everybody knows that nothing is free in this world. Even the terminology free trade must sound good, it must mean good things. However, when we ask about fair trade, when we ask about trade that is on good terms with our trading partners, that would improve working standards, that would take care of the environment, that would ensure we do not support regimes that we would never tolerate here, the government is silent. It is not interested in those types of trade agreements, and we see that with Colombia.

Our member for Burnaby—New Westminster has been pushing hard to get some sort of review of the human rights situation in Colombia. He has made some progress with members after a massive campaign involving thousands of Canadians. They would like to know that their trading partners are living up to some sort of standards, some sort of requirement, for the privilege of trading.

That is how trade works. It is a privileged status. It is not a right. Countries do not trade with each other based on any fundamental rights. Countries trade as a privilege. It is the same with operating a business. It is not a right to operate a business in Canada. It is a privilege. One has to follow certain rules and those rules cannot be broken.

If someone ducks out on taxes, the government comes after that individual, and rightly so, except for a particular class of Canadians. When we get into the billions of dollars, suddenly a whole new set of rules apply. People go to what is called a tax haven, and tax havens, as has been described earlier today, are set up by countries that have a skeleton of a banking sector. They are often islands. They are often very small countries, sometimes democratic, sometimes not. The list of prestigious Canadian families who have their money socked away in these tax havens is astounding.

We see it time and time again, whether it is Liberal or Conservative governments. A little private meeting goes on and Revenue Canada says that is all right. We saw it with a former prime minister, for goodness sake, who got caught evading taxes. It was Brian Mulroney, a Conservative. Those folks used to know him, then they pretended they did not him and now they know him again, I think. What did he do once he got caught. He cut a deal with Revenue Canada. If he paid back a portion of those taxes, it would be satisfied.

I wonder if the government offers that same deal to the average hard-working Canadian taxpayers. If they are having a hard time this year or last year paying their taxes, Revenue Canada will cut them a deal and they will only pay 50%. Of course not. The system would not work that way.

However, when we move up into this upper echelon, if it is a Brian Mulroney, or a Bronfman, or somebody who has some connections to this place, they can cut deals with the government to pay half of the taxes they actually owe. How does that make any sense? How can those guys call themselves fiscally conservative if, at the same time, they allow tax avoidance to go on? How can they be running deficits while, at the same time, taxes owed to the good people of Canada are not paid. The only reason is because there are connections, there is the familiarity, there is a need to have some sort of comfort with certain Canadians who are of a certain wealth.

On the agreements with countries, we hope, as Canadians, that our presence in the world, our ability to connect with other countries is for a betterment of the world. We do not go forth, whether it is through military or diplomacy or trade, hoping to make the world a worse place. Part of our underlying belief as Canadians is that we have accomplished something in our country that is, as some have said, a country that works well in practice but not in theory. We want to be a symbol and an example on certain issues, particularly, for other countries struggling to establish a democratic rule of law, struggling to establish women's rights and rights for minorities, rights for the gay-lesbian community. Canadians feel okay with promoting those things overseas. We hope we do that through our diplomatic core and our military, from time to time.

However, when we look at the free trade ideology coming from the government, all these other issues get short shrift. One wonders if the government even believes that trade is a mechanism and a vehicle for promoting human rights and environmental standards around the world. Conversely, and I think this is much closer to the reality for those guys. The very nature and vision of the role of Canada, the very vision of Canada promoted by the Conservative government is not one that supports human rights. It is not one that supports environmental protection or the rights of first nations people. The reason I can make that strong statement is there is so much proof that the government does not mind cutting access to women's programs. The government does not seem to mind cutting back funding for certain groups that it does not like if their ideology is not right. It does not mind watering down environmental regulations on the oil and gas industry. In fact, the government suggests the oil and gas industry can regulate itself, which might be better.

In committee this morning we heard that our national regulator that governs oil and gas for most of the country, with the exception of Newfoundland and Labrador, had said that it was no good to have these regulations any more, that we should just be goal-oriented in our rules. Let us not have rules, in fact. Let us just have guidelines. Would it be a good idea to just have goal-oriented guidelines for driving regulations or for the safety of our homes and our streets? Of course not. We put regulations in place.

As my father-in-law, who works for a compensation board in British Columbia, says that a lot of the rules and regulations that govern industry for workers' safety are written blood. What he means is those rules were not invented out of nowhere. They were often invented after there had been an accident. In his case, workers' safety, somebody died, or somebody was hurt seriously. They realized they had to change the rules guiding construction, or a certain industry. The had to make them stronger so people could go to work knowing they would come home at the end of the day. That is the principle from where regulations and rules come. There is not a little office of people sitting around Ottawa, not that I am aware of, who make up rules for the sake of it. We make up rules and regulations so they enable good practice to flourish, so they give people a fair opportunity earn a decent buck to be social citizens. There is a social licence to operate that is buried within it.

However, when it comes to the regulations, the government promotes a Canada that does not necessarily belive in this, that industry can self-regulate. If we look to the Gulf of Mexico right now, we see what happens when an industry is given more self-regulation.

This does not always happen in one shot. It happens over time. There is a creep, they call it. It creeps edge by edge. We saw it in the stock market in the U.S. and in Canada. We put rules and guidelines in place to try to contain some of the greed that would be rampant in any stock market, because it is a profitable place to make money. We put those in place because not everybody was very ethical. Some traders want to bend and break rules and rip off their investors. In American, it was the Glass-Steagall act. In Canada, we had a bunch of other stuff, but the creep happened.

Bit by bit, the Americans eroded some of their guidelines. They eroded the rules and decided to do outcome-based guidelines. The outcome-based guideline for the stock market is to make money. If people keep making money, that is all right, but they will not be guided. The invisible hand of the free market will save them at the end of the day.

The marketplace is a magical thing. It can bring billions of dollars into new technology, ideas that spur innovation and that ambition can be allowed to flourish. However, it needs to have some rules and some sort of containment so people who try to do the right thing are rewarded and those who are crooks are thrown in jail. We take away all those regulations and they make guidelines. We make goal-oriented objectives and we get what we get, which is the worst of the worst are able to manipulate the system to their best abilities and make money in unethical ways.

Now we move to trade in Bill S-3, the bill from the Senate. We need to have these tax deals so people are not double taxed. That is a very fine principle. It is something we can support. Then we look at all the existing tax haven countries. Has the government signed any treaties with those countries, the places where people actually set up tax havens?

I have not known Turkey to be a great and rampant source of tax havens for the wealthy and rich around the globe, because it is not. We have the list of the places that are. Transparency International runs a list of the most corrupt regimes every year. Some of those are also the regimes where these tax havens exist. All one has to do is pay somebody off to not pay any taxes in the country, to never have to declare it and to have one board member.

Former Prime Minister Martin ran his whole shipping company under different flags of convenience. Why are they convenient? Because if people have shipping companies like the former Prime Minister of Canada did and they do not want to follow Canadian, American or European law, they fly them under the flags of some backwater African country, which has no rules or regulations for shipping. Therefore, they do not have to stand by any labour or environmental laws because they have this convenient flag flying over their ships.

The problem with the government's ideology on this is it also applies a flag of convenience to its trade policy. It uses trade in a convenient way to accomplish only a very narrow band of things. There are those of us who believe strongly that trade with a country can be an opening of a conversation about improving the conditions for people on both sides of the deal, both Canada and the country with which we are trading.

There is some evidence that this has happened around the world. In the last 25 years, we have seen steady improvements for the lowest-income people across the globe in some regions. However, it is false to think that this just happens naturally and that it is some byproduct that will happen no matter what we do. Very strong evidence exists to show this is the case.

We traded with Iraq during the entire Saddam Hussein regime. We bought its oil. The Americans bought its oil. We did not put a single stipulation in place. We had to drive furiously at a previous Conservative government to get a proper regime set up against South Africa when apartheid existed. We had to make the moral implication. The argument against any trade sanctions against South Africa was that free trade had to reign. That was the most fundamental principle. If we just traded with South Africa, it would eventually let apartheid dissipate.

Of course that was never going to happen. It would still be there today if the world did not get together and say that, as part of human trade, we would insist on human rights. As part of our trade with South Africa, to buy its resources and products, we would insist that it also treated all its citizens with some level of dignity. It was a good moment for the world when we finally decided that. Conservative ideological thinkers were against it. They opposed every step of the way.

We see it again here today. We need good trade policy in Canada. We are a trading nation. We need to shut down tax havens around the world and have people, whatever their social standing, pay their fair share of taxes. It is the right thing to do.

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Madam Speaker, it has been rightly pointed out that when we go through the list of the 87 countries that have signed these tax treaties, there is only one that looks as though it qualifies as a tax haven.

If the member for Kings—Hants is correct, that the way to get these rogue countries in line is to sign tax treaties and free trade treaties with them, which would somehow alter the way they do business, then Barbados should be a perfect example of a country that is totally reformed, yet we have lots of evidence to the contrary. It is still as big a tax haven as it was before.

Then we look at the real tax havens and we find that we have tax treaties with none of them. If we are trying to stop Canadians from putting their money in tax havens, then one would think we should be sending our negotiators off to sign treaties that will turn these practices around with those countries that are known tax havens.

How do we treat Canadians who engage in investing in tax havens? We give them an amnesty. When the Swiss bank employee gave out all the information from the computer disk last year and we uncovered all of the Canadians' undeclared income, thousands of Canadians rushed into the nearest Canada Revenue Agency office and took advantage of the amnesty. What sort of message are we sending to Canadian high rollers? We are telling them to go ahead and invest in tax havens, because what is the worst that will happen? When they get caught, all they have to do is go to the nearest Canada Revenue Agency office and the amnesty applies. They declare that they have been bad, they declare the income, pay the tax and they are scot-free.

That is not the way to run the system. We should not be giving tax amnesties. We should be shutting the door on these tax havens and saying that if people take a chance and send their money to a tax haven, then when they are caught they will do time in jail. That would be tough on crime, but the government is not tough on crime.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, shutting down tax havens is not an easy thing to do for two reasons.

The first would be the political connections of those who use tax havens. It is not the average citizen who is flying around the world in a Lear jet looking for the best tax haven available. These are folks who have means and resources and sometimes strong political connections. We have seen that here in Canada.

Second, even though it is difficult, it is necessary, and if the government were sincere about the effort to shut these things down, it would do something very particular that is not actually in the bill. It would include some way to measure its effectiveness. It would include some way to say that after six years or after 10 years, it would look back and measure the effectiveness of closing down these tax havens.

Again, the number of tax havens in Turkey escapes me right now, but I suspect it is not that many. The question is, does the government have the courage, if I can use that word, to actually go after real tax havens? If it does that, will it do that with the full support of the House? Madam Speaker, you had better believe it. Would it do that with the full support of Canadians? Absolutely. Canadians pay their taxes because they know it is that money that pays for roads, schools and hospitals, but they get properly cheesed off when they find out the richest of the rich do not pay a nickel.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Skeena for his passionate speech on this subject which really makes Canadians' blood boil the more they think about it.

I have looked on the websites of a lot of chartered accountants and they advertise tax-motivated expatriation. That is the code. Those are the buzz words for sleazy tax-cheating loopholes. That is what it is.

Perhaps my colleague would like to comment on something I read in an article by Diane Francis, a right-wing journalist, in the National Post. She was calling the public's and Parliament's attention to one of these sleazy tax-cheating loopholes, her words I believe, involving family trusts. A wealthy family can expatriate its entire fortune for a one-time payment of 25% tax. From thereon after, all the money earned out of country by that block of money, even if it is repatriated into Canada, is tax free.

The children of that wealthy family, and there might be dozens of them, could all be getting an income from that offshore pool of money and never pay taxes again on that money expatriated from Canada.

The United States does not allow it. I do not believe there is a western country in the world that allows it. I wonder if my colleague has heard of that and thinks we should address that as well.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, one of my colleagues from the Conservatives said, “Was that not the Paul Martin scheme?” No. He had set up an entirely different scheme to avoid paying taxes and avoid rules. He orchestrated multiple tax havens.

It is somewhat ironic but I remember asking him at one point that as the finance minister of the country, the person in charge of tax policy, how did he feel about avoiding taxes while imposing taxes on Canadians. He had his own company which was doing quite well. This was not a company that was on the ropes or dying and he needed to do something about it. The company was doing quite well. He just wanted it to do a fair shake better. He was avoiding taxes while he was imposing taxes on Canadians.

We can remember that the 1990s, and this was raised during oral questions today, was a time when we were making very difficult decisions in this country about cutting back on folks. The hypocrisy of that moment, which was not felt by the then finance minister, someone hoping obviously to become the leader of the country, is so discouraging to Canadians.

The idea of having tax-motivated expatriation, the idea that one can make a whole whack of money, move it out of the country and pay a one-time small penalty on it and then slowly move it back in for generations to come is tax avoidance. Tax avoidance in most places is against the law because if one person does it, everybody does it and the whole system starts to fall apart.

The impression is that it is the wild west down on Wall Street and that Canada is the land of bliss and tight rules and serious governance. The OECD, a group of the most developed countries in the world, came out with a report citing all of the different barriers to trade and investment of each of its member countries. This is an exhaustive report. The number one reason that it cited not to invest in Canada was the lack of fair rules and regulations. Our markets were seen as too risky because we did not apply the rules consistently to companies. Investors were shy about putting their money into the country.

It was not high labour rates. It was not high environmental standards. Lord knows those are all being watered down. It was the simple fact that our market was not being governed properly. With Bear Stearns in the United States, the folks got caught and they did what is called the perp walk. We have seen this. The CEO is put in handcuffs and is walked down Wall Street in front of the cameras. They do it for a reason. It is to send a signal to the other guys to say, “Try this and we will do the same thing to you. We will humiliate you. We will put you in jail. No more golf memberships for you”.

In Canada, what do we do? We have a self-governing, self-regulating body. I cannot remember seeing any CEO, and there have been a few, who have completely ripped off--

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Conrad Black went to the States to go to jail.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Conrad Black would have never been caught here.

At the end of the day, if the government is really interested in getting at the tax haven issue, we encourage it. These folks should be paying money. No more of this tax-motivated expatriation. It should be illegal. Any accountant that promotes it should be thrown in jail and his or her licence taken away.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Madam Speaker, while I have the floor I would like to put forward a motion to make the leader of the New Democratic Party, the member for Toronto—Danforth, the Leader of the Official Opposition for a period of one week.

[The Acting Speaker, NDP, Denise Savoie]

Members have heard the motion. Is there unanimous consent?