Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Rosen, I just want to ask you a couple of questions
Just quickly, we're here for tax leakage, and I think we're getting away from the subject. But I think the points you bring up are quite important, and it probably means that we have to spend a little bit of time on this. I think your points were mainly on governance and regulation and on how that's interlinked when investors are putting money into these vehicles, whether it be trust or even shares of companies.
First of all, you have a problem with trust funds, income trusts, but what about the real estate tax sector? The government decided to keep the real estate tax sector going. They're going to have the same problems.
Secondly, for corporate structures, you can't tell me that junior mining companies out there have not undergone significant scrutiny, or non-scrutiny, if you wish, where they state that they've discovered minerals, diamonds, or gold—you name it—and meanwhile they're not worth anything. The marketing or the underwriters, or whoever you want to blame it on, have brought the stock prices up to the sky, and then all of a sudden they've dropped overnight.
So you can't tell me it's just in the trust sector. I'm not sure how you can correlate the two, where you can say it's fine that the corporate sector remains alive, and that the real estate sector and the income trust sector remain alive. You can't have it both ways.
This is not the issue of the hearings, but we're here to find out what the actual tax leakage is and why Canadians suffered all these losses. Again, I agree with your last comment, which was that the actions of the previous government are not necessarily what caused Canadians to lose all their money. But I think the Finance officials say that nothing happened between October 31 and November 1 outside of the government announcement, so I think today's new government has to take part of the blame.