Thank you, Madam Chair.
It's great to be back at the finance committee for this study of tax havens.
I would like to set the context a bit. Tax havens are when rich and well-connected people and companies develop creative structures to try to avoid taxes. Tax avoidance is legal, but governments should try to prevent structures for tax avoidance that allow wealthy and well-connected people to exploit loopholes that aren't available to normal people.
I think a lot of these issues are technical in nature, which means that trust is very important—that the public can trust that their leaders are on their side, trying to solve these problems, trying to make the system fairer, and that they're not playing for the other team. This is why, when you have a prime minister or other leaders who are personally invested in tax havens and who benefit from the continuing existence of these tax avoidance structures, that obviously creates problems for trust. They are personally invested in outcomes that are contrary to the public interest, contrary to what most people would want—which are solutions to the problems of aggressive tax avoidance, keeping money out of the system and effectively requiring everyday hard-working Canadians to pay more taxes.
Mr. Ward, you've done a lot of work specifically on Brookfield, as we've discussed, which used to be a company that the Prime Minister led, and he's still invested in it. I wonder if you could speak to the issues of trust and conflict of interest around having a prime minister or leaders in general who are, on the one hand, maybe professing to be concerned about these problems but who are, on the other hand, personally invested in the continuing existence of structures that allow tax avoidance for their own advantage.