Madam Speaker, it was in 1971 that the federal government reviewed and overhauled Canada's tax system. One would think, now that we have 87 tax treaties signed, that it should be time to take another review of this system to see how well these tax treaties are working.
I asked the parliamentary secretary this morning whether he could tell me the number of tax evasion cases and the amount of money that has been recovered as a result of one or any of these tax treaties but he could not answer the question at all.
We have a government that comes to this House to respond to a bill from the Senate, which is the second go-around, and we have 87 treaties in place, but government members cannot tell us whether even one case of tax evasion has been solved by signing those agreements. They also cannot tell us the amount of money that has been recovered as a result. Yet they want to continue signing more and more of these agreements that may not even work for all we know because we do not know what the results will be.
The Conservatives say that it would reduce or eliminate tax evasion. Barbados is one of the 87 countries with these agreements. Since signing that agreement with Barbados, has it done anything to reduce tax evasion and the tax haven status of Barbados? I will bet that nothing has actually happened. The Bloc member today was giving the information about Barbados and it sounds to me like it is just as big a tax haven as it was before.
When we look at the list of countries that really are tax havens, the government has no agreements with them. One would think that if the Conservatives' intention is to close down tax havens, they would be aggressively looking at signing tax treaties with countries that are in fact tax havens.
I would like to ask the member whether she has any comments on this whole idea that somehow the government has no information about how the 87 tax treaties have worked since they have been signed and why it would be moving ahead to sign more when it cannot tell us the results of the first 87.