Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm intrigued by this amendment and will be listening very carefully to the discussion through the course of the committee. My concern all along, Mr. Chair, as you well know, has been that there's been no provision for the revenue side when we're talking about expanding the debt ceiling.
We have not put in place any wealth taxes, unlike other countries that have done so. Also, no efforts have been made to stop the hemorrhaging of money going offshore. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has evaluated that at over $25 billion every year, which means that over the last decade a quarter of a trillion dollars has gone to overseas tax havens.
We are not putting in place any measures of the sort that we had in the Second World War on the revenue side. For example, we had an excess profits tax. It was 75% of excess profits through the Second World War. At the end of the war effort, it was at 100%. There were measures taken in our past that actually balanced out revenues and expenditures, even in a situation like the war effort, where very clearly increased expenditures were called for.
I decry the government's lack of effort to take on the revenue side of the equation so that the debt ceiling does not have to be raised. We've seen Canada's billionaires increase their wealth during this pandemic by over $60 billion. That didn't happen in the Second World War. Measures were taken to avoid that kind of intense profiteering.
We have whole sectors, like the web giants, that don't pay any tax at all. As well, we have not seen the kind of action that needs to be taken to tackle overseas tax havens and to put in place a wealth tax that would actually help make sure that resources are available for Canadians through this pandemic and in the rebuilding that must surely follow.
I'm intrigued by the amendment and I look forward to the debate, but I think that is a major weakness in the fall economic statement and a weakness, of course, in Bill C-14. Ultimately it would be a colossal failure in the budget that we're finally going to see now, after two years, on April 19.
If the government says billionaires can have a free ride, that banks, with profits of over $40 billion, don't have to pay their fair share of taxes, and that web giant companies that have profits in the billions of dollars don't have to pay anything at all, there's something fundamentally wrong with that fiscal picture. We have also seen the use of COVID funding by many companies—profitable corporations—for dividends, executive bonuses and stock buybacks.
That's why I'm intrigued by Mr. Fast's motion. Mr. Fast and I don't agree on many things, but I'm intrigued by his amendment and will be listening very carefully to the debate.