Madam Speaker, 87 treaties have been signed and, from what I can see, only one of them was signed with a country that would be seen as a tax haven, and that is the country of Barbados. Having signed the agreement with Barbados, one would think we would be able to determine, with some degree of accuracy, how much progress we have made in turning around the tax haven status of the island of Barbados.
As the Bloc member pointed out, Bermuda, Barbados and the Cayman Islands had an increase in investment from $30 billion to $90 billion. We do not have tax conventions with Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. If the intention here is to cut off the tax havens, then why do we not go out and try to sign tax treaties with the worst offenders of the tax havens? However, we are not doing that. We are signing them with countries that evidently we do not have a problem with them being tax havens. The minister, if this whole idea was working, presumably in his speech would have singled Barbados out.
He would have said, as the member for Kings—Hants would say, “Well, we signed this agreement with Barbados, and look at the huge improvement we have had in their tax haven status. They have gone from being a tax haven to a non-tax haven”.
That is not what the Bloc member described this morning. The way he described the companies operating in Barbados, they clearly are still operating in a tax avoidance environment, which is not something the government should be trying to emulate.
I think that the government is operating on the basis that this whole agreement structure facilitates trade. If members read the speeches from the senators in the Senate, that is what they would notice in their speeches. It is all about trade and this is just one little piece in that whole idea that we are open for business and let us trade with one another.
It is just lip service being paid to shutting down tax havens. If that were the intention here, there would a different picture being presented in this situation.