I would like to thank Mr. Saxton for at least saying something before the voting ends on this matter. His comment actually corresponds to mine, that the government claims that the tax credit is not working and is no longer meeting its objectives. What does the government use as a basis for saying that? There is nothing, except one study from the University of Calgary that Mr. Mintz supports and that he presented. But we have two studies, one from Deloitte & Touche Inc. and one from SECOR-KPMG, that argue that, on the contrary, it has been a success.
This is not a tax shelter like the other tax shelters we hear about. It is a fund into which small savers invest a small portion of their paycheques. The government is supposed to be encouraging people to save; this is an ideal way to do it. Not only does it encourage saving for retirement, it does so productively. Instead of putting their money into speculative funds or into funds where the money is going to lie dormant because they hold mostly stocks and bonds that provide no direct support to the economy, these people are deciding to save their money by putting it into venture capital funds.
Yes, the government has established a venture capital action plan for a period of 10 years. It has invested $400 million. If it really wanted to make that venture capital fund work, it would have jumped with both feet onto the offer that the two Quebec funds made, to invest $2 billion into the fund.
You have a choice. Either you can have a venture capital action plan that starts at $2.4 billion or that would be guaranteed to reach $2.4 billion with the cost of the tax credit reduced by 30%. Or you can have the current plan whereby the tax credit is eliminated entirely without knowing exactly how that will affect the overall level of venture capital or the level of savings. That is an easy decision to make, it seems to me. Any economic analysts you like would have made the sensible decision. The government made the opposite decision and abolished the tax credit.
The answer has been exactly the same from the outset. The government has no evidence that it does not work. It has not even done an impact study. It relies on one study only out of all the others that have been done and on a second study that was done peripherally by the OECD. It rejects all the studies on the extremely complex, extremely rich role that the Quebec funds play.