Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Hamilton for his thoughtful remarks. Both the tone and the content of his speech I found very useful, in fact heartening in a way.
In his criticism of the budget though, we should acknowledge one thing that we have been asking for, for a long time. I was very pleased to see that we are finally doing away with this idea of tax motivated expatriation. That is the technical term for it. We call it sleazy, tax cheating loopholes of tax havens.
Finally, I believe this budget has eliminated this idea of tax fugitives hiding their profits in tax havens so they can avoid paying their fair share of taxes in this country. That I am willing to recognize as a very positive step and something the NDP has been calling for, for many years.
In the same vein, I would like my colleague's views on this. Many of us who have been watching corporate Canada and corporate America are of the view that white collar crime has become a blue collar issue. At least white collar corporate governance has become a blue collar issue, in that if we cannot trust the financial statements of the companies where our pension plans are invested, we all have something very serious to worry about.
Therefore, my question to my colleague is this. In the context of this year's budget, would it not have been worthwhile to revisit some of the practices regarding corporate governance, such as what led to Enron, which was tax auditors and tax consultants being one and the same person? In other words, there should be a wall between the people who audit the books and the people who are giving advice on the books.
Would he agree that this issue of corporate governance perhaps should be the next place we should be going in terms of reining in corporate Canada?