That is still missing. We do not even know about the $3.1 billion. We have asked, and we will keep asking. Hopefully in a few weeks, we will hear. The Conservatives have the whole summer to figure out where that $3.1 billion is. We are going to give them the summer to figure out if they can find that $3.1 billion.
The facts are that we could use this tax money to reduce our deficit, which is the largest under the Conservative government. However, the Conservatives have put no proposals forward. They are laggards in the G7 in coming up with progressive policies to go after these cheats so that we can recoup the money that has been lost by Canadians.
At the end of the day, it is Canadians who will end up paying for the mismanagement by the government.
I know that the Conservatives do not answer, but I asked them who was going to pay for the debt they have accumulated over the last six or seven years. In fact, they have not had a surplus budget. They call themselves fiscal conservatives. They have not had even one surplus budget. Who is going to pay for this? It will be my children, their children, their grandchildren and my grandchildren. It is unfair to leave the largest debt to our children.
We have ways we can collect this. Again, Conservatives have a chance to recoup some of the money being siphoned off to offshore accounts.
We talked about fiscal conservatives and their ability to manage budgets. They have not had a surplus.
Let me talk about their trade deficit. When the Conservatives came in, they had a $26-billion trade surplus. That means that we sold $26 billion more than we bought from other countries. That is good for Canada. It creates jobs. If we sell more of our products overseas, we create local jobs here. That is good. However, under the Conservative government, we have had a trade deficit of over $50 billion. That means that we are buying $50 billion more in goods coming into Canada than we are selling to other countries.
Not only that, under the Conservative government, our merchandise trade deficit is the largest ever. I mention that because that is how we create secondary well-paying jobs. However, under this government, we have had failure.
That is the Conservatives' record, whether it is on deficits or on trade. These are the two things they often talk about, but they do not tell us about the other side. They tell us that they have signed this or that trade deal, but the trade deficit just keeps growing. We asked on the trade committee to look at why we have a large trade deficit. They did not want to study that.
Not only that, getting back to Bill S-17, my hon. colleagues, the NDP finance committee members, offered a number of suggestions as to how we could go after these tax evaders. One of the suggestions we offered was the following:
That the federal government study and measure, to the greatest accuracy possible, Canadian tax losses to international tax havens and tax evasion, in order to the determine the Canadian federal “tax gap”.
They do not even want to go there. They do not even want to look at the deficit.