Mr. Speaker, some of my colleagues on the finance committee who attended the committee's sittings wish to thank all the groups and experts who came to testify before the committee. Since today, they are away on business in their constituencies, I will express our party's dissenting opinion.
After several attempts to reach a consensus, the Bloc Quebecois had to reject the majority report tabled by the finance committee.
The official opposition is not against the principle of family trusts as such. However, the Bloc Quebecois cannot endorse the conclusions of the committee that favour maintaining Bill C-92, which allows wealthy Canadian families to use family trusts as a tax shelter. According to the experts who testified before the committee, the tax revenues forgone as a result of Bill C-92 would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Bloc Quebecois was also surprised at the complete reversal of the position taken by the Liberal Party of Canada which, when it was in the opposition, vigorously condemned Bill C-92. Today, by tabling this report, the Liberals put their seal of approval on the deferral of capital gains tax for the next twenty or thirty years and have thus refused to abolish the tax privileges of the wealthy.
In concluding, I would like to say that, for these reasons, the Bloc Quebecois demands, in its dissenting opinion, that the family trust system be amended so as to tax the capital gains of these family trusts.