Madam Speaker, I want to briefly summarize what I said previously.
I explained how much a tax on currency speculation was needed. I also explained that we could not allow the money speculators in New York and elsewhere around the world to sometimes bring countries to their knees by statements that a country was a basket case or whatever which drives trading in the currency down. I also explained that we could not allow money speculators, who just play with paper and create no real wealth and do not produce anything, to jeopardize ordinary people's working lives by their actions.
Let me use the few minutes I have left to build on why Canada should push for such a policy globally. The fact is a small and some would say very tiny tax on currency speculators could stabilize economies. At the same time it could help finance social initiatives and third world development.
By stabilizing economies I mean that some speculators who are playing with the financial markets on Bay Street or some other such place have a notion about a country and make a statement that a country is in serious financial trouble, that it is a basket case or whatever. Those words get into some of the investment papers. That one single statement by people play around with money and create no real wealth other than for themselves starts a run on the country's currency and causes serious problems for the finances and people of that country.
Putting this small Tobin tax as it is called on money speculators would ease that kind of activity. They would not play those kinds of games. We are talking about a very small tax, somewhere in the rage of one-tenth of one per cent. That kind of a tax would also bring in a fair bit of return. It would have to be put in place globally. With that kind of financing a lot could be done for the third world in terms of needed social policies.
The book Good Taxes by Alex Michalos had this to say about the tax and how it would be put in place:
A transaction tax on purchases and sales of foreign exchange would have to be (1) universal and (2) uniform; it would (3) have to apply to all jurisdictions, and (4) the rate would have to be equalized across markets. Were it imposed unilaterally by one country, that country's FOREX market would simply move offshore ... (5) Enforcement of the universal tax would depend principally on major banks and on the jurisdictions that regulate them. (6) The surveillance of national regulatory authorities could be the responsibility of a multilateral agency like the Bank for International Settlements or the International Monetary Fund. It might be authorized to set the size of the tax within limits. (7) It would have to possess sanctions that could be levied on countries that fail to comply with the measure.
Those points are important. That is what we are saying we have to move toward. All those conditions have to be met. It is important for Canada to lead the way by discussing with other countries that this kind of tax is needed on a global basis. This should lessen the money speculation and would provide moneys to do good things in social policy and other ways for the third world.