I applaud the involvement of political leaders in the whole tax area. I think tax is critical. You can't have a democracy without a functioning tax system, so I'm all for the G-8 and the G-20 being involved.
However, at the current stage, we're in a very highly technical area here. If I had one thing to recommend to this committee in the area under the heading of tax evasion and tax havens, I would say to be very careful about precisely what it is you're talking about. Even in the few minutes we've been talking here, we've talked about multiple subjects. I think developed countries could strengthen their rules in regard to tax havens and protect their own tax bases. That's where my statement was going.
I don't really know Canada's laws, but I know that in the United States there are some very simple things we could do, which we have resisted doing—presumably for political reasons—that would protect the U.S. tax base against tax havens. That's a very different question—I want to be clear, a very different question—from what we can do to protect the tax base of Tanzania or Zambia. That's an entirely different story, and both of them are probably different stories from exchange of tax information.
All of them are important, but putting them all together in one pot doesn't help to solve any one of them, in my opinion.