Mr. Mahaffy, thank you for your presentation.
There is another way of looking at the sales tax on savings. It is not so much a sales tax on savings as a tax on the services offered by investment companies.
For instance, I suppose that the holder of a self-managed fund does not pay a sales tax. Nor is there a sales tax on premiums paid to the Canada Pension Plan or the Quebec Pension Plan. However, as soon as we go to a middle man, there is a brokerage fees tax.
I'm going to speak as the devil's advocate. For brokerage companies, one way of avoiding a tax on savings would be to absorb the sales tax. Could that be another possibility, rather than simply eliminating the sales tax? Because indeed, this is more of a tax on services than a tax on savings.