Mr. Speaker, my Liberal friend says this is simple stuff. Maybe to a certain kind of mind this is simple stuff. But to an intelligent mind, it is gobbledegook. Look at it. I know I cannot hold up a prop, but this really is not a prop. Look at all of its pages. They are all grey. There is no white, because if it is grey, it is open to interpretation.
Imagine those guys who work in Revenue Canada and have to deal with this book day in and day out. It takes a special kind of personality to handle that kind of stuff. Thank God they have it because I know I do not have it.
There are no white pages, they are all grey. Everything is grey. If one has a good tax lawyer, a good tax accountant or a good tax adviser, one can probably get out of paying the kind of taxes one ought to be paying. That is what it is all about.
There are hits. Walk into any major bookstore today, and the best-sellers are right at the front. What are they? Ways to avoid paying taxes. Jacks tax adviser, Mary Jane's and so on, everybody has a favourite tax book and it is updated every year because these things change every year. That is what we are doing today. They are mainly designed to show how to avoid paying taxes. They are today's best-sellers. I am sure my Conservative friend would agree.
Serious players probably have them for their night time reading. People can go to seminars on how to avoid taxes altogether. It is called a tax haven, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas or the Isle of Man, all sorts of things. For a nice fee, these seminars will lay it all out, how to avoid paying any income tax at all.
This is a depressing debate today. These provisions by and large are probably fairly decent. There is a tidbit here to help this group, a minor change to help that group, but nothing will change. It is just more gobbledegook, more complexity and more fuzziness in the tax system and people will be happy for the little bone the Minister of Finance has tossed them in this little change.
Canadians are demanding real tax reform. They want to change the system. They want to toss out the pickup truck full of books and start all over again. They want a real tax system, a progressive tax system. They want to stop the use of the tax system to achieve all these minute changes in today's society.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance is here. I value his judgment. I hope he asks me a question.
Is it not time that we sat down as a finance committee or as a committee of the whole parliament and went through our tax act? Let us identify the major exemptions in our tax act and apply a cost benefit analysis to every single one. What is the cost of this tax loophole, or tax exemption, and what do we get from it? If it is not clear that we get more than it costs, then we should toss it out the window.