Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question, which is particularly relevant since he, like me, is the member for a border riding.
As I said at the beginning of my speech, border ridings have been having rather a hard time of it for about a decade now. The tax convention with the United States was amended, which led to negative consequences for a lot of workers in Quebec and the rest of Canada, specifically, that their incomes were subject to additional taxes.
Workers in the forestry sector—in my riding, these are people who worked in Maine—were often penalized by the situation, in terms of their pension incomes. We had to work very hard to fix that situation. At that time, we calculated how many people there were working in the United States. Thousands of people earn income in the United States every year. In some cases, it is a substantial income; in other cases, it is extra income that is earned at a particular time of year. That is why this tax convention has to be studied carefully.
As well, there is an impact on people as individuals, on the businesses where those people work and on the economic benefits that flow from improvements to a tax convention like this. There are major complexities in tax practice that can hinder regional economic development.
At the same time, we have to ensure that in fixing the problems we do not standardize things in a way that does not reflect the spirit of the legislation in Quebec and Canada, which is not the same as in the United States.
We will therefore look closely at how this amendment of the tax convention will impact people here. At first glance, and after preliminary study, it seems to us that this bill to amend the tax convention is beneficial. The vast majority of what we see in the bill will benefit the border regions, their people and businesses. There are a few matters that must be considered more closely to ensure that we will ultimately have a better tax convention.
In practice, we realize that once these aspects are corrected, once it is signed and becomes official, it is then very difficult to make corrections. The advantage of the decision-making board will certainly mean that any negative impact can be mitigated. In my opinion, everyone wins when the basic principle of “one tax for one income” can be applied. At the same time, we cannot proceed without ensuring that we have given sufficient consideration to the question of how to avoid tax loopholes, because we are familiar with federal practice.
In the past, the agreement with Barbados was made to the real detriment of Canadian taxpayers and to the benefit of a number of people whom that tax convention, that loophole, has served well. We absolutely must ensure that this model is not repeated in a tax convention with the Americans. Let us hope that the collaboration on the tax convention between Canada and the United States will send a message to the Americans: we have to pursue the same kind of collaboration even further to ensure fluidity at the border. Because in this respect there seems to have been some ground lost in recent years.