Madam Speaker, my colleague has raised a very salient point. It seems that the government is on automatic pilot, or going by rote, or simply responding to what the Senate dictates. The Senate says “thou shalt have a tax treaty in place, here is the bill, go to it”. Without any thought, without any judgment, the Conservatives simply go along. We have to sincerely question a government that seems to be rudderless.
As my colleague pointed out, it has been 40 years since any effective review. As my colleague also pointed out, when asked, the minister responsible could not provide any information or any answers. It would seem to me that if one is going to pursue a specific course, then one would be well advised to do the research, understand the rationale for that course and to bring something substantive and logical to this place.
We deal here with public policy. As leaders in this country, we need to ensure that the public policy we enact makes sense. The nation depends on our wisdom and our judgment. To hear that the minister responsible does not know the answer to very basic questions makes me very concerned.
In regard to tax havens, we know there has been significant loss in terms of the legitimate taxes owed to Canadians through tax havens. Billions of dollars have disappeared, billions of dollars that could have gone into affordable housing for people who are struggling or could have given us a national child care system. We have been waiting since 1984 for a national child care system. It is a little late in the day in terms of the kind of response that we should have had.
Those billions of dollars could have been invested in environmental protection. The government is oblivious to the fact that we have an international crisis with climate change and that we have a crisis in terms of oil spilling into the pristine, or once pristine, environment in the gulf. It has absolutely no plan in place to protect our Arctic waters from a similar spill. It also has nothing in place to address the real possibility that oil will enter the gulf stream and come right up the Atlantic seaboard and devastate our fishery and our coastlines as it has devastated the coastlines of Louisiana and Florida. Billions of dollars are in tax havens.
We need to get a response from the government. We need to know what it knows in regard to who is utilizing these tax havens and how we can repatriate the money owed to Canadian taxpayers. We need to enact the kind of public policy that makes sense, rather than, as the government is doing, blindly following along, dancing to the tune of a Senate bill without any substantive investigation or understanding of the impact and the effect.