Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Winnipeg Centre for his interesting intervention in the debate this afternoon on Bill C-33, the income tax amendments act.
I want to ask the member to comment on the question that our NDP colleague from Hamilton Mountain put to the Minister of Finance this afternoon in question period. She noted in her question that on January 1, by the time that Canada's top CEOs are sipping their morning coffee on that New Year's Day morning, they have already earned more than the average Canadian earns in an entire year. I think that is a very dramatic example of the growing prosperity gap in Canada.
Indeed, our colleague went on to point out that CEOs earn 240 times what the average Canadian worker earns. That is a huge prosperity gap.
What is worse, she went on to point out that those companies that pay these CEOs those huge salaries can write off those huge salaries against their business taxes, which amounts to a subsidy by Canadian taxpayers of these outrageously huge salaries of these wealthy Canadian CEOs by people who are struggling to pay bills and to make ends meet.
I do not think that Bill C-33 deals with a change to the Income Tax Act or to our tax laws that would make it impossible for that to happen. In fact, the member for Hamilton Mountain has a private member's bill which suggests that any CEO's salary in excess of $1 million should not be deducted from business taxes. One million dollars sounds like a pretty high threshold and a pretty generous threshold to me, and an acceptable level.
I want to ask the member for Winnipeg Centre to comment on this issue of tax fairness. Could he comment on why this huge loophole in our tax laws has not been covered by the legislation we are discussing?