You talked about—and I hope I got the questions correctly—there being a large amount. I've been surprised in my experience of how many taxes are avoided through international corporate profit shifting. One company, Cameco, of course, was in court for over $2 billion. Internationally, the OECD estimates that approximately 1% of the GDP of OECD nations is lost to tax shifting. These tend to be larger corporations, so there's an unfairness there. The parliamentary budget office also came out with some estimates on that.
A couple of the ways that corporations avoid taxes and shift are, one, the interest deductibility rule. The OECD has proposed some measures to limit that to 10% to 30% of profits. I was glad to see this included in the Liberal government's platform. Another one is through intellectual property. These are a number of the different measures that are used.
The thing is that the the international corporate tax system is based on the arm's-length rule and also on transfer pricing. We should be moving to a system that is similar to what we have in Canada, which allows formulary apportionment—sorry, “formulary apportionment” is not a sexy term—basically allocating the profit between countries, as we do provincially, according to real economic factors. So there's another provision that can also be used in that way, namely, economic substance or unitary taxation of multinational corporations.
Does that help?