Thank you, Mr. Chair. I know there are a few members of the committee who are anxious to shut this down in a hurry, as we did Bill C-26, but I think this is so important that I thank you for making this exception.
Mr. McGowan, it was obvious when the minister was here that he was, I would say, unaware of this or certainly wasn't well briefed on it. I'm not going to try to speculate why, but I can tell you that our inboxes are full. We had two very impressive presentations before this committee last week, which fell on deaf ears.
With all due respect, and with all due respect to many of my lawyer friends, I don't think a partnership of lawyers who may practise in different areas of law is in any way similar when compared with what we're talking about: these medical structures, which are designed not as tax dodges, but are designed to recruit some of the best minds in the world to come to Canada. They're also designed, if we were listening to the testimony, in such a way that many of these partners perform work that is not necessarily billed, because we're talking about a publicly paid billing system. It would seem to me that for you to compare dentist and lawyer partnerships with this particular type of partnership is blatantly unfair.
I think the finance department—which this obviously originated in, because the minister certainly didn't originate it—is taking a pretty bull-headed approach to something that I think is plain wrong. You, as a finance department official, are not going to pay the price, but my Liberal colleagues across the way are going to pay the price at the ballot box next time, because what you are doing here is, in my view, taking away something that in our country we've been trying to encourage our health care professionals to do: to work more as teams.
This is going to break them up. You're going to have a whole bunch of individual practitioners or smaller partnerships. Finance will get no more money at the end, as pointed out to the minister earlier by my colleague. It seems that all we're hearing is that this seems to be falling on deaf ears, and I'm saddened by that.