From a privacy perspective, there's no question that clarity would be be extremely desirable here. If I can speculate on how we got where we are, I would go back to the fact that the purpose of the agreement is to avoid tax evasion, and it may be that tax evasion will occur for accounts under $50,000. That's possible, so an agreement was negotiated between Canada and the U.S., and the sum total of the agreement and the Income Tax Act is unclear. From a privacy perspective, that's highly undesirable, because citizens do not know, if they have accounts totalling less than $50,000, whether their personal information will be transferred or not to the CRA and, ultimately, to the IRS. From that perspective, clarity would be extremely desirable.
On April 14th, 2016. See this statement in context.