Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It used to be said that you cannot manage what you cannot measure. My view is that if the U.K., the U.S., and Australia have methodologies that they've used effectively to do what we're proposing, I don't understand why Canada would deprive itself of what could be useful data.
My colleague, Mr. Caron, mentioned that this budget, which contains some measures that I think we could all agree on, is a step in the right direction on an aspect of the tax gap, the tax evasion issue. It would be really useful to put that in context a few years down the road if we have methodologies to see just how effective those measures are and where we might improve them going forward. Until we measure it, we'll never really know.
I'm the first to acknowledge that this isn't a simple measure, but as Mr. Côté says, you don't count people who are unemployed and say that's the unemployment rate. There are sophisticated statistical methodologies that have emerged and evolved over time like there are in the United States and the U.K. where they do this very work.
Not being a statistician, I'm not able to say what those methodologies are, but I'm confident that our CRA is up to the task. I don't see any benefit in depriving ourselves of information which our allies believe to be valuable.