Mr. Speaker, I listened quite carefully to the hon. member's long rant about so-called tax havens. It is hard to know where to start with such a naive analysis of the international taxation regimes in the world.
Everyone in the chamber, everyone watching us on television and everyone in this country is entitled to arrange his or her affairs, his or her own affairs, or his or her company's affairs to avoid taxes, to minimize the impact of taxes. That is lesson number one in law school and accounting school. Tax avoidance is an expectation on the part of the government and taxpayers are entitled to arrange their affairs accordingly. You do that, Mr. Speaker. My hon. friend does that. Everyone in the chamber does that. We try to minimize the tax impact on our income.
Tax evasion on the other hand is illegal. Tax evasion cannot be tolerated by any country whether or not one is in a so-called haven or whether one is in any other country.
It is amusing to me that my hon. friend conflates those two ideas and misses the point. It is more than ironic that the member purports to speak on behalf of Quebec. His separatist friends, the Parti Québécois, turned Quebec into not a tax haven but probably a tax hell. There the rates of taxation on the people of Quebec are probably among the highest, if not the highest, in North America.
If a person in Quebec or a person in any other part of Canada, or a corporation in Quebec or a corporation in any other part of Canada takes the first rule of income tax seriously and says “I am entitled to arrange my affairs in the way that is most advantageous”, in other words to avoid taxes, not to evade taxes, then he, she or it is entitled to seek the jurisdiction that most satisfies those needs.
What the hon. member fails to state in his diatribe about so-called tax havens is that the information exchange and the transparency allow countries that have entered into tax treaties with the so-called tax havens to tax income that is earned as a source income in Canada. Absent these treaties there is virtually no chance.
As I understand the thrust of my hon. member's diatribe, he would pull us out of any tax convention with any other country which does not tax at the level that he thinks is appropriate. Therefore a taxpayer would be left with some unhappy choices.
I put it to my hon. friend that having a tax convention, such as the one with Barbados and others that he disapproves of, is a good thing. Canadian authorities get access to information on which they can tax income that is sourced in Canada, that is earned in Canada which impacts many of these companies, especially companies from Quebec, that do some business in the Caribbean. Banks do some business in the Caribbean on which they pay taxes. Much of those taxes, because of the transparency and the OECD protocols, gets reviewed here and taxed as Canadian source income. Absent these conventions, absent these rules, we would see none of the income.
I put it to the hon. member that the entire premise of his speech is in error.