No, I am afraid not, Mr. Speaker. On this front, dealing with fairness in our taxation system and loopholes available to the wealthy and corporations in our country, it is very hard to find any kind of action. There is a trail of negligence and broken promises. The Auditor General has made report after report with very little action flowing from them.
What I worry about is that the Conservatives are beginning to go down the similar path that the Liberals followed, which is to make a lot of promises, do a few things like the income trust issue and the double-dipping, and then not really get at the big issues around tax havens.
What we really need is for the Canadian Conservative government to take immediate steps to shut down all remaining offshore tax havens, especially when we consider the fact that the Canada Revenue Agency is now investigating Merck Frosst for putting $2 billion away in Barbados.
We spent years trying to get the Liberals to lower the flags of convenience flown overseas by Canadian corporations to avoid taxes. I do not want to spend another decade fighting Conservatives to get the same thing done. Conservatives have the time and the mandate to actually act against tax havens, and I am waiting to see the signs of that. I am waiting to see if they are serious about this.
In opposition, the Conservatives railed against the Barbadian tax haven, just as we did, because it benefited certain members of the government and the corporate elite. Many Conservatives, including the current Prime Minister, voted for a motion to close this tax loophole that results in individual Canadian taxpayers having to make up the difference. If the Conservatives leave this loophole open, they are demonstrating that it is not ordinary Canadians who benefit from their policies. If the Conservatives do not act to close the Barbados tax haven, all their protests in the case of Canada Steamship Lines and other obvious examples will mean nothing but cheap politics.
I urge the Conservatives to put their money where their mouth is and actually do something to prevent so much investment from going to offshore financial centres. They should keep in mind that between 2003 to the present that number has increased eight-fold.