Thank you, Chair. I'm pleased to be here this morning and I'm pleased to be the first witness at the hearings you're having on the tax fairness plan.
I'm accompanied this morning by Robert Wright, the deputy minister; by Mark Carney, the senior associate deputy minister and G-7 deputy for Canada; by Bob Hamilton, senior assistant deputy minister, Tax Policy Branch; by Brian Ernewein, general director of the tax legislation division, Tax Policy Branch; and Denis Normand, senior chief of payments, financial sector division, Financial Sector Policy Branch.
We'll hear from all of those folks, certainly from Mr. Hamilton, about the analysis done by the department, after I have an opportunity to make some opening remarks. You'll also see the charts around the room, which we produced in order to try to demonstrate, in an easily readable manner, some of the major issues that are involved in the tax fairness plan.
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
You have received a briefing book, members of the committee, with a copy of my statement, which is more or less what I'll follow; a document prepared by the Department of Finance outlining our revenue estimates and calculations; and a series of charts illustrating the growing trend toward trust conversions in foreign ownership of energy trust units.
I'm pleased to be the first witness, as I said. Make no mistake, the decision that was taken on October 31 is all about fairness for Canadian taxpayers: in the first instance, fairness for Canadian taxpayers and their families, who would be asked to pay more and more if we did not implement the tax fairness plan; fairness within the corporate sector, where the current rules give income trusts a tax advantage and distort investment decisions to give income trusts better access to capital than entities that are organized in the corporate form—that is, levelling the playing field between corporations—and fairness for Canadian taxpayers who are seeing tax dollars sent out of the country to foreign investors.
As you can see from the chart over there, in the large energy trusts, 50% of the ownership—