Thank you, Professor Hejazi, for appearing again before committee. I value your input on this issue.
I wanted to go back to the comments of Mr. McCallum and those of my colleague, Madam Ablonczy, and the questions she asked specifically pertaining to foreign investment and foreign takeovers. I wanted to suggest that your comments on that are very much in line with what we've heard from other analysts around the country. Specifically, the Financial Post remarked that, “Rarely has a political news release contained as many bad economic ideas as the Liberals compacted into their call yesterday for a national frenzy over foreign investment”. The Edmonton Journal said, “In what can only be construed as a lame attempt to exploit public angst about foreign takeovers....” The National Post said, “ Unfortunately, a more typical case of politicians meddling in a world of which they know little....” I wanted you to know you're not in exclusive company on that.
I want to come back to thin cap rules and debt dumping. I recognize you've indicated a couple of times that you're not a tax expert per se, and that's okay. We talk about double dipping, which the minister has specifically said is an area we would like to pay a little bit of attention to. I agree with you that it's important that we enable our companies so they can operate efficiently and effectively and so they can expand into global markets. That's good for Canada and good for Canadian jobs.
Having said that, if we are allowing them to bring what I would term illegitimate debt back into Canada, or if we allow them to operate outside of thin cap rules, effectively they don't pay any Canadian tax or they dramatically reduce their Canadian tax burden on Canadian income earned in Canada. If we are to look at that solely as a means of trying to get more in step with the 75% of OECD nations that do have thin cap rules, do you have any suggestions on that? Obviously we have to be very surgical in how we're doing this. The last thing I want to do is hamper Canadian industry from being able to succeed, but I also want tax fairness. Do you have any suggestions on that?