Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First I'd like to welcome the three witnesses and thank them for being with us. We are finally able to meet. At the last committee meeting before the holidays, a tragic event prevented us from holding this meeting.
Mr. Coulombe, we recognize that you receive orders from the government, in this case the Minister of Finance. You are told to introduce a tax, and you must do it. That's your role. In previous sessions of Parliament, when this tax was introduced, I was surprised and even shocked to learn that there was no economic impact study to go with the introduction of this new luxury tax.
For example, the folks at the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada have said over and over again that they support the principle behind the tax. That's also my political party's position. However, we must keep perverse and negative effects from harming industry to such an extent that they neutralize the original objective to make the rich pay. I'm thinking in particular of the devastating effect that the aerospace industrial cluster had in Quebec and Canada.
When a policy like this is being rolled out, I find it unacceptable that no impact study has been conducted to assess it. It's even more obvious when we think of the sobering example in the United States. They brought in a similar tax in the early 1990s, but then withdrew it precisely because the impact had not been properly evaluated.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer expects that this tax will cause a shift in buyer behaviour.
Is a change in behaviour like this being considered in the impact study you are currently conducting?