Thank you for the question, Mr. Julian.
With respect to your question about how much money we could go after, the answer is really not easy to provide insofar as multinationals are generally not at all transparent, and there is a lack of country-by-country profit reporting.
Canada participates in country-by-country profit reporting programs, which we can basically use to find out the actual economic activity of a company like Amazon on Canadian soil. But that data is not made public. That makes it hard for researchers and economists to know what to focus on.
Estimates show us that a lot of profits are made by companies like Facebook on advertising or Google and Amazon on web hosting services, and they don't pay their fair share of tax.
So, first, these giants are competing unfairly with Canadian businesses. Second, in an economy that has basically gone digital over the course of the year, as most people have turned to giants like Amazon to be able to shop when the stores are closed, money and economic activity is flying under the Canadian taxman's radar. That is extremely problematic, especially in a situation where public spending is exploding for entirely legitimate reasons.
It has often been said that we had a war economy of sorts during the pandemic. In a war economy, it's only right that everyone should put in their fair share of effort and that some sectors are harder hit than others for a time, since activity is concentrated in certain sectors only.
With this in mind, I think it's a crying shame that they didn't go ahead with the original plan to introduce a diverted profits tax on April 1, 2020. We missed out on the worst year to be able to do it. The OECD is still negotiating on it, and there is no guarantee that we will have an international policy until 2022. So—