Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
I offer a warm welcome to the minister for being here today.
Mr. Gallivan, welcome to you in returning to our committee.
There's a false narrative put forward by the opposition that our federal Liberal government has done nothing to tackle evasion and tax avoidance. We heard from Mr. Gallivan that we've actually made a significant investment since 2015 in terms of tackling tax avoidance and tax evasion. There has been $444 million invested in 2016, $523 million in 2017, $90.6 million in 2018, $150.8 million in 2019, and an additional $304 million in this year's budget.
Minister, we also heard, as you mentioned, that this significant investment of over $1 billion has resulted in over $5 billion of identified additional tax avoidance coming into our coffers.
We've also heard that there's the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who do a bit of a ranking. They're the ones who broke the Panama papers and they've ranked Canada nine out of 80 in the world. We're among the top in terms of actually being able to tackle these issues on a global scale. Therefore, I want to give a huge thanks to you for your leadership, and a huge thanks for the leadership at the CRA, for the extraordinary efforts and work that they have done. Thank you for that.
To truly appreciate our efforts and how far we've actually come, can you take a few moments to add a little context to our government's efforts to fund the fight against tax evasion, by describing the situation at the Canada Revenue Agency when you took over as minister in 2015, after nearly a decade of Conservative cuts?