Thank you for being here and sharing your perspective on things.
I'm going to move in a couple of directions, but first, thank you for your comments about the initiatives our government took to combat some of the tax-evasion, tax-avoidance issues. It was recently reported that our 2013 measures brought in $1.57 billion in the 2014 fiscal year alone. Thank you for being complimentary about the initiatives we took to close some loopholes.
I want to talk primarily about your views, and it's a little anecdotal on this. A little bit is from experience in the mid-1990s in the building industry when I was president of Ontario Home Builders'. We tried to study the black market, the underground economy, to quantify it for the Ontario government of the day, and through the study we came up with an estimate that the government was losing somewhere around $6 billion, which was a fairly shocking number. It made the front page of the Globe above the fold.
I'm fast-forwarding to 2016. I speak with people in the accounting industry who are some of the top professionals about what the issues are right now regarding what people are doing in light of higher levels of taxation they're facing. These, in many cases, are people like your client base who would be high net-worth people looking for every opportunity to pay their fair share but not to pay more than their fair share. The anecdotal comments that I get back are, why concentrate on that? Why not go after the underground economy because it is rampant? This is some of the comment I'm hearing back.
I don't have empirical evidence to give you today for 2016. That is some from a study we did in the mid-1990s. That said, it's also around your comment that really hits the nail on the head—no pun intended for the building industry—which is the fact that if your neighbour does it, all of a sudden it validates that you should do it. When they have the roof replaced and the guy says “Here's the price for cash, $4,000. If you want to pay me and get an invoice, it's $5,500.” This happens every day, on every street in Canada.
In your estimation, having the tax knowledge, where is money best spent in terms of making sure we get our fair share from that kind of underground economy that is, anecdotally, right now growing? I would put it that way. I would say the evidence is it's not being subdued, it's actually growing. Can you lend a perspective on that, please?