Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Again, the broader and more important issue is not simply tax avoidance through partnerships, but the broader issue of tax evasion and the use of foreign tax shelters. We have said repeatedly that this is an area in which other countries have done a better job of clamping down on some of the foreign tax shelters.
We have seen in the past, in 2005, an investment of $30 million yield over $2 billion in tax revenues from simply enforcing rules that already exist to clamp down on those foreign tax havens.
Again, Mr. Chair, I would ask the committee to delay these changes such that we have an opportunity to consider this in the broader context of what we should be doing from a public policy perspective to ensure that we tackle what ought to be a priority. I don't think we're doing a good enough job on it.
Again, I reference the work Mr. Mai and Senator Percy Downe have done on this.
It does not make sense, Mr. Chair, at a time when we face budget deficits. We were told by the finance minister recently that they wouldn't be balancing the books until 2016-17. We learned from the Prime Minister a couple of days later that in fact that was wrong and that the books would be balanced by the next election. Regardless, I acknowledge these are challenging times in terms of trying to get back to the balanced budget days of Liberal governments of the past. Those were the good old days when budgets were balanced, the federal debt was paid down, and that kind of thing.
This is important for the minister and the committee members. We're being entirely constructive in suggesting that investments in CRA, in the department Ms. McLeod represents, that enable them to clamp down on tax evaders will yield a far greater reward for taxpayers and for the fiscal framework than some of these measures. This is something we would hope the committee would consider. We would have hoped that the government would have considered it as well.
Mr. Chair, I think we all agree on issues of tax fairness. I don't want to rib my Conservative colleagues over this, but the reality is that we do need a broader look in Canada at reforming our tax system. We have not had a significant study of our personal tax system in Canada since 1971. If you were to try to sum up in a word what has changed in the Canadian economy since 1971, the word would be “everything”, not just in the Canadian economy, but in the global economy. Other countries have reformed their tax systems to build, in some cases, fairer and also more competitive tax systems.
We speak about the issue of income inequality. Governor Carney has raised this as an issue. It's also an issue we should consider when we're looking at tax policy in the overall design of our tax system. I think when we consider measures, whether you're talking about PRPPs or about income splitting, there's only so much money to go around. There's only so much tax expenditure. We ought to take a serious look at real tax reform in Canada. That's where we should be focused.