Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for coming. I would first like to tell you that the Bloc Québécois expressed a number of reservations about the signing of this agreement, especially because—according to us, the OECD and a lot of others too—Panama is considered to be home for tax havens and, as a result, it allows for tax evasion.
To this end, we questioned the stakeholders who came to meet with us, the officials or those who negotiated the agreement. We were told that the Minister of International Trade sent a letter to his Panamanian counterpart in order to sign a tax information exchange agreement. The answer we got was that negotiations reached a dead end. There was no agreement signed because the two sides did not want the same thing. Panama wanted to sign one form of agreement and Canada another. So there was no answer.
Could you please share your thoughts on this?