You're right, I am very impatient, because whenever I bring up the fact that companies are using tax havens legally, the minister misses the point and tells me that she is going after fraudsters. I am talking about the legal use of tax havens by companies.
Since Parliament began sitting virtually, it's been mentioned a few times that Denmark and Poland have decided to deal with the issue. Even France's finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, said that companies with subsidiaries in tax havens would not be eligible for public assistance.
We hear the Prime Minister and other government officials say all the time that the wage subsidies are going to workers, so I'd like to cite another example—banks. The government is injecting huge amounts of cash into the financial system and repurchasing troubled assets in massive quantities, and yet, the five major banks in Toronto, alone, are continuing to save billions of dollars every year by artificially redirecting their profits to tax havens.
This is unacceptable. This has nothing to do with wages for workers, and everything to do with the repurchase of troubled assets, cash flow and billions of dollars that the government could be going after.
Is the government going to seize this opportunity to make the corporate use of tax havens illegal?