My first question is for Jean-Pierre Laporte, and it's about individual pension plans.
How could I explain this to you? Let's look at how a person with a high income is taxed. The individual pension plan is not all that matters; there is also the $400,000 tax exemption for Canadian controlled private corporations. If SMEs want to get around paying taxes, all they have to do is hire a tax expert. I don't want to be mean, but how can I tell you this without being a little mean?
However, the taxpayer has only one shirt and would like to hold on to it. Currently, there are so many tax loopholes that make it possible for someone who makes $250,000 a year to pay as much in taxes as someone who only earns $50,000, over a 30-year period. There's something of a tax fairness issue with that. Dr. Léo-Paul Lauzon, a professor in taxation at the Université du Québec à Montréal, has pretty clearly shown this to be true. Too much comes out to the same as too little. Perhaps we need an individual pension plan.
I think that's hard to justify in terms of ethics and fairness.