A tax treaty is a full-blown bilateral agreement that governs all cross-border income tax flows. It doesn't typically concern itself with consumption taxes, like our GST. It gives tax relief for certain things. Traditionally, if you're a Canadian multinational and you open a corporation in Barbados, then because of the fact that it was a tax treaty, you could bring all the profits from that Barbadian entity back to Canada on a tax-free basis. So we give reciprocal benefits, a whole host of tax benefits.
TIEAs are much shorter agreements that only focus on one issue, namely, the exchange of taxpayer information. As mentioned, we have 87 bilateral tax treaties. We've had them in place, I guess, since they started, since the First World War. But the TIEAs are a new thing. None of them are in force currently. Again, they just focus on this narrow area of taxpayer information exchange.
That's another reason that certain observers are cynical as to their ultimate feasibility, because if you don't give benefits to a country, a tax break, why should they cooperate? They can sign the agreement. We force them to--the OECD, the G-20. We've put them on potential blacklists if they don't sign. So they've all agreed to sign, but it's an open question whether they'll actually enforce the agreement. They have really no incentive to enforce it. We're not giving them anything, unlike in the Barbadian tax treaty, in which we give them certain tax breaks, certain rights. It encourages actual investment via multinational firms, typically. So the TIEAs, again, are very narrow in their focus.