Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the hon. member on summarizing so many misconceptions into a very short question.
To start with, as he knows there were 40 meetings. Just to reiterate, in the structure of the House of Commons committees any member of the House of Commons may join in the proceedings. Many of these issues were raised. When the member gets a chance to read through the hearings over the summer holidays I am sure he will know that members of the other three parties asked some excellent questions of people who wished us to change the tax structure more broadly.
Dealing with some of the specific misconceptions, the government has addressed the family trust issue. A paper was released earlier this month by the Department of Finance. It was presented to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance last week. The chair was asked to arrange with the opposition parties to set out hearings or to suggest ways of proceeding.
I am sure the critic of the Bloc Quebecois would be interested in family trusts. He will know the committee report is now available. We will seek our direction from the other members of the committee and the steering committee on how to proceed with an analysis of it.
On the question of corporate taxes and the contributions of corporations to the Canadian tax base, the member knows that in the February 22 budget presented by the Minister of Finance we made more progress in closing tax loopholes for corporations than any other government has done. We are very proud of what we have done.
Lastly, we anticipate an increase in profits from the corporate sector this year. I do not want to get ahead of statistics to be released by the government over the course of the year, but the hon. member will be happy to know that corporations will be pulling their fair share as the profits from their businesses go up in the current calendar year.