I believe that's correct. I've read Jim Stanford's report.
We're concerned about the unequal distribution of income in Canada, and within that, the distribution of capital income is even more unequal. As well, within capital income, capital gains are the most unequally distributed.
I think there are some legitimate comments being raised by my colleagues on the panel, particularly to the extent that we don't want changes in tax policy to affect real investment. By that, I mean investment in machinery, equipment and buildings as opposed to speculative investments in real estate or other financial assets. We should have an eye to those things.
However, generally speaking, we're talking about the very crème de la crème. It's not even the top 1%; it's the top 0.1% of earners who are benefiting from these gains. Again, for the privilege of having reduced taxation on those through both the inclusion rate and the lifetime capital gains exemption, and there are a bunch of other rules that allow.... If there are multiple owners to an enterprise, each of them gets to avail themselves of the full exemption. If it's passing on a family farm or a small business to a child, there are provisions for allowing that to be claimed over multiple years.
I think the finance department and the legislation, to date, has done a good job of anticipating some of the unintended consequences. The particular tax change now, by having the threshold at $250,000 for the higher inclusion rate, is very well designed. There's a great study in the Canadian Tax Journal by Rhys Kesselman, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year and didn't get to see, essentially, his proposal get adopted as federal government policy. He was recommending a second-tier inclusion rate of 75%, so that's higher than the current one.