Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll be sharing my time with Mr. Casey.
Thank you for appearing here today, gentlemen.
I'm looking at the report, at the preliminary conclusions of the IMF, and it goes into some detail on the tax burden and taxation, even to the point of discussing the GST and the appropriateness of further reductions or cuts to that. If a report is done like this on various countries—and I would imagine that it is on all countries—then an essential ingredient included in that might be for commentary on some of the countries that are classified as tax havens, and that could impact Canada itself just by the fact that it's well known that a major shipping company is based in Barbados for the sheer purpose of taxation. The flagging can really be from any country.
Would it not be appropriate to have some commentary in there on how that affects countries that engage too heavily in those kinds of endeavours because it impacts what we are able to do with our taxation?
Second, many of the countries that are the tax havens--or the tax-free countries, as they claim to be--have fees upon fees. A country like Turks and Caicos, for example, which says it's tax free, really isn't. You pay an annual fee for your property, which in effect is really a tax.
So in the combination of the two, I think it's important to know, what really is impacted by tax-free tax havens and the offshore locating of businesses for taxation benefits?