Thank you for the opportunity, Chair.
On the question of getting large suppliers to register in Canada to collect and remit the tax, that's not something that's in the legislative framework now, so what we are doing in the absence of that is working to encourage people to know what they are supposed to do and to educate about the obligations under the tax act. In some other world, where other jurisdictions do this, were we to force the foreign supplier to register and remit, we would come up against the issue you've raised.
What I would say in the area of sales taxes is that economists can debate how they get shifted or not shifted, whether they're passed along in the price or whether they're absorbed by the provider. It's a bit of a theoretical question right now, given that we don't have such a regime, and then probably, obviously, market conditions will dictate the extent to which taxes are passed along versus absorbed.
From our perspective at the CRA what we are interested in doing is looking at the current legislative framework and finding a way to make the system work in a way that's fair, and, as you can see in the comments provided by the Auditor General, as this grows in importance, just making sure that we are paying adequate attention to it and monitoring and tracking. Those are a couple of the key recommendations that have been put to us, and we've made good progress on those and we're almost there.