It appears that we're in full agreement on this subject, although we may change our minds after we hear witnesses, and I wouldn't want to prejudge that. Since that is the case and there's not too much point in going further when we're in agreement, I'll change the subject to income trusts.
As you may know, we recently came up with a proposal to have essentially a much more moderate rate of taxation on income trusts. We believe that, as four expert witnesses who came before us established, a much more moderate tax would in fact be sufficient to ensure tax fairness and to ensure that the personal sector was not disadvantaged in any way by lower taxation paid by corporations in income trusts. We dealt with the tax fairness issue according to these four experts, and we didn't really have opposition from the government side, because on that all we got was a blacked-out paper. We didn't get the numbers.
The great virtue of our plan is that experts have also shown that by virtue of a much lower tax rate, we do much less damage to the sector, and that approximately two-thirds or so of the wealth that was destroyed--the $25 billion of wealth that was destroyed by your plan--would come back under our much more moderate plan. So in that sense, our plan is fairer: it is fair not only to households, but also in that those who've lost so much money would stand the chance of regaining the majority of their losses.
I think this is a balanced alternative. CIBC World Markets has come out with a report stating that the Liberal proposal does create a balance between the investing public's need for a strong and growing income trust sector and the public policy need to stem tax leakage and eliminate unrelenting conversions to income trust structure. In addition, the Canadian Retired & Income Investors' Association says, and I quote:
The Liberals' policy is a major improvement over the ill-conceived, highly damaging Conservative plan. We applaud them for caring about seniors and other ordinary Canadians.
Mr. Minister, you were aware of this option. Our proposal is the same as one of the proposals made by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and certainly finance department officials were aware this was an option. Clearly it did far less damage to people who had taken the Prime Minister at his word and invested in income trusts; and clearly as well, it would have restored tax fairness, and it would have been, indeed, fairer because it would have been so much less damaging to those individuals.
So my question to you, given these third-party endorsements, and given what I would regard as a compelling need to do minimum damage to those who had taken the government at its word and invested in income trusts, rather than maximum damage to the tune of $25 billion, is whether you would consider changing your plan to the plan that we have just proposed.