Thank you for that question.
I think our efforts in ensuring that our tax system is working are important within Canada as we govern how Canadian organizations and individuals potentially invest abroad.
Maybe I'll take that second part first.
Two very important measures that we've worked on together with the international community have been what's called the base erosion and profit shifting project, the BEPS project, and the common reporting standard. They're both quite important.
The common reporting standard allows us to get access to know what bank accounts are held in other jurisdictions so we can get a good understanding of whether any organizations are moving money into other jurisdictions. The base erosion and profit shifting is really working together with other countries to make sure that companies don't move profits to places where taxes are low and move expenses to places where taxes are high, obviously eroding the tax base. That's important internationally.
Nationally, as we heard earlier in this hearing today, we've been focused on making sure our tax system works to benefit all Canadians. First and foremost, we lowered taxes on middle-class Canadians, so we took the tax bracket between $45,000 and $90,000 and moved it from a 22% tax bracket to a 20.5% tax bracket, reducing taxes in that bracket by 7%. What that did was lower taxes not only for people in that tax bracket, but right up to and including everybody up to roughly $200,000 or so, when they get into the new tax bracket that we introduced that was eligible for only the wealthiest of Canadians.
As you heard, we also then looked at small business taxes, lowered them, but at the same time put in measures to make sure that people are reinvesting in their business.