Thank you for your kind words, Mr. Julian.
The report we released earlier today on corporate profits is designed to estimate how much extra revenue the government could raise if it imposed an additional tax on companies that earned higher profits than would have been expected based on the average of previous years.
Businesses that have revenues of $10 million or more and that have had revenues above that threshold in any of the previous three years are targeted, and their profit margins and the transactions in 2020 are taken into account. Profits in excess of what would normally be expected based on previous years' profits are subject to an additional tax of 15%, and this tax in the 2020 tax year would generate almost $8 billion in revenue.
This is part of a series of other work we've done at the request of various political parties, yours included, Mr. Julian. We've concluded that a tax on the web giants could generate between $2 billion and $3 billion, depending on the parameters. We've also done some work over the years on the tax gap. This concept tries to estimate how much money the government would raise if all the money it is owed were paid to it. We estimate that about $25 billion is lost to the government through a combination of tax evasion, tax avoidance, and loss caused by people who report their income but fail to remit the money they owe the government.
So there is a range of measures that could be taken to reduce this gap. It isn't realistic to eliminate it completely, since there are people who go bankrupt between the time they report their income and the time they should be paying their taxes. So there are some unrecoverable taxes, but it would be possible to reduce the tax gap by $25 billion with some legislation and some tax collection measures, including at the Canada Revenue Agency.