Mr. Speaker, it was not my intention to speak to the bill until I heard the parliamentary secretary's attack on the Bloc member who just spoke.
I found it astounding that what we heard from the parliamentary secretary was effectively an elaborate defence of countries that make tax evasion legal. What he said was that tax avoidance was something that everyone does and that countries are a party to and so on.
However what he did not say is that we have a hemorrhage of taxes that ought to be paid by Canadian corporations to the public coffers to sustain our most important public services and programs precisely because the government refuses to do anything about the fact that the law does not capture those taxes properly.
While we heard the parliamentary secretary say that it was quite legal for people to avail themselves of tax havens, the previous member quite rightly pointed out that we needed to do something about the problem.
A great deal of analysis has been done on this but the parliamentary secretary treated the member's comment as though the member was somehow dreaming it up for some paranoid reason or some unduly partisan reason. The member was speaking of a very respectable body of research done by tax accountants and economists that points out the incredibly low levels of taxes that Canadian companies are paying in places such as Barbados and many other countries simply because they are completely free to do so.
While Canadians pay their fair share of taxes, we have examples of the major banks. It does not matter which bank but the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce happens to be the one at the centre of this particular analysis. This bank, which would have and should have been paying taxes in the amount of $844 million, was able to reduce that legally, because we do not have any tax agreements to capture this, to $239 million.
I know that seems like a lot of taxes but we have to consider the fact that instead of paying at a rate of 36.6% on the profits, the bank was actually paying only 10.4%. The result is that the government uses the fact that we do not have the tax dollars to maintain our basic programs very conveniently.
Earlier today the parliamentary secretary stood and agreed with an opposition member who said that we should do something about the problem of pensions not being indexed in the U.K.
We should also be addressing a problem that has been raised again and again by the member for Windsor—St. Clair and the member for Windsor West about completely unfair taxation, practically tax confiscation, that penalizes Canadians--