I guess we want to go to the question pretty quick.
One of my issues is the names of the clients. I think there has to be a certain level of fairness and privacy for individuals when they're dealing with the Canada Revenue Agency. In the political environment here, I'm not always certain that that's perhaps the most appropriate means to be dealing with something, especially concerning people for whom we don't know their situation in their lives. So I'm a little concerned about that, because I'm very concerned about the idea surrounding privacy.
On the other hand, when we first started this idea of going and looking into KPMG and the Panama papers—this was in the media—the idea, I believe, the original intent, was that we would discuss with the officials and then we would see where that would lead us over time. I'm very supportive of the idea of getting more names to have greater discussion and trying to understand how these tax havens work, Canada's implication in the international community, but I think this is really what we should be trying to get to, trying to get more people here so we can truly understand it, get them on the record, and really try to gain a greater understanding of that.
I'm not sure what everyone else thinks, but I would actually like to propose not a substantive amendment, but a slight change. I don't think my change will be major in any way, but the idea in this one is to remove, for instance, the word “compel” and just have “request”. That does not preclude in the future, if KPMG refuses to provide that information, coming back and trying to deal with this again, and also just removing the names of clients.
Essentially, the original motion is, “That the committee compel KPMG to provide documents indicating the names of clients who used the Isle of Man tax sheltering scheme and the names of KPMG employees responsible for the development and marketing of the tax scheme.”
And we would replace it with, “That the committee”, not compel but , “request KPMG to provide documents on the Isle of Man tax sheltering and the names of the KPMG employees responsible for the development and marketing of the tax scheme”.
I don't believe this is a substantive change to this motion. I believe it's still in the spirit of what you're trying to get at and it wouldn't preclude, later on, coming back if KPMG refuses to provide more documentation to this committee so that we could continue to do our work and really get to the bottom of what's going on. I applaud Monsieur Dusseault and Monsieur Caron for bringing this to the forefront.