I love your question. I think it's a terrific question, and I wish I had an hour, but I know I only have a minute.
To follow up on the last comment, “as long as politics...”, when you have people standing up and talking about tax evasion, tax havens, multinationals not paying their fair share, and then when you ask a broad cross-section of Canadians, it appeals to their...I'm not sure what the term is, but....
What we want to do as policy makers is create an informed decision. We don't want to make a decision only to get votes or only to appease a wide part of the public who may not understand fully the issues before us.
I believe we get tax fairness when we create an environment in which our companies are able to be globally competitive. There's a $10,000 prosperity gap between Canada and the United States: the average American earns $10,000 more than the average Canadian. If we could create an environment that is globally competitive and close that prosperity gap—raise the level of income in Canada to the level it is at in the United States—then with the same tax rates that we see today, the tax revenues we would generate would be so substantial that we could fund all of the initiative the government has before it.
So the right way to get the tax fairness is to think about the economics, create an environment that creates the biggest economic pie, and then take the tax revenue that's generated from it and use it for the initiatives that we have before us.
Thank you.