Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to speak to the capital gains tax exemption. Now, we have publicly listed securities, but the proposal is for shares in private companies and also real estate.
The Department of Finance officials told us that there was a tax expenditure they assigned to these gifts of about $34 million per year. When pressed, the officials said that it was difficult to assign that value, because they admitted it was based on the assumption that the disposition of the shares would have occurred in any case. To understand how you assess a value to that, you have to understand the psychological impact of capital gains tax on investors. The reality is that capital gains tax actually locks up a lot of capital, because people don't want to sell shares that they have held onto, in some cases, for years and years, and in some cases decades.
Would you agree that the actual cost to taxpayers is significantly less than that which the Department of Finance officials are assigning, rather arbitrarily, today?