Yes, but you can understand how outrageous that is to Canadians. You have small businesses that are paying their fair share of taxes, and families that are paying their fair share of taxes. Regular Canadians are really struggling, particularly during the pandemic, and here you have big corporations that can declare active income offshore, pay zero tax on it, and because of the structure of both the tax information exchange agreements and the double taxation avoidance agreements, they don't have to pay income tax on it here.
It's a licence to avoid taxes, for tax evasion. We've structured a system that is basically encouraging the very wealthy and big corporations to take their money overseas. As the Parliamentary Budget Officer indicates, that's a $25-billion loss to tax revenue each and every year.
As the chair of the finance committee admitted, or just mentioned, it's $150 billion that could have gone into a wide range of things, such as education, health care, clean energy or housing over the last six years, by the end of the sixth year of the government.
What I'm interested in seeing is to what extent, both with the double taxation avoidance agreements and the tax information exchange agreements, there is accurate reporting and to what extent CRA is actually tracking tax dollars that are going overseas and never subject to the income tax that every Canadian family and every small business has to pay.
Could you tell us, under the current tax information exchange agreements and the double taxation avoidance agreements, how much money is basically being taken out of the tax system from CRA's standpoint?
As I mentioned, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates $25 billion a year.