Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I've said for some time that this was a finance minister out of his depth. It became abundantly clear that this was true when he himself reversed on interest deductibility. Income trusts are another saga confirming this thesis, and I heard another one today. I can't believe the government would restrict the overseas investments by REITs to 25% of their assets.
I understand that Australia has one REIT that's as big as all of Canada and that grows overseas, and here we have a government that says you can't invest overseas. But by investing overseas, don't you get more revenues for the government?
So is there any rationale for the government to limit the investment overseas in this way? Can anybody think of any reason? Maybe one of the Conservative members will come up a reason during their turn. It just strikes me as entirely irrational.