Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by thanking all my NDP colleagues who were more than happy to speak to this motion and support it strongly.
In 2009, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, referred to a building in the Cayman Islands that housed 18,857 duly registered corporations. At the time he said, “That's either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam in the world”.
I listened closely to the comments by the members from the governing party and their objections to supporting this exercise, which urges the federal government to take serious measures to assess the federal tax gap arising from the use of tax havens and to accurately measure the Canadian tax revenues lost to tax havens.
In order to obtain reliable figures on the tax gap, the motion calls on the Canada Revenue Agency to provide the Parliamentary Budget Officer with the information necessary to prepare an estimate. We know full well that the Conservatives are at loggerheads with the Parliamentary Budget Officer and that they are not going to support this transfer of information.
I would like to start by saying that I completely object to the arguments put forward by members of the government about how difficult it would be to assess tax losses. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, have done it. There is no reason that Canada cannot do the same.
To help government members reflect on the approach that could be taken, I would suggest that we need to look at the many tax treaties that Canada has signed with countries of convenience. Then we could assess the impact on the tax system for Canadians and Canadian businesses.
I am not just talking about the 92 treaties on double taxation that Canada has signed, notably with a number of countries that are considered tax havens, but I am also talking about the tax information exchange agreements that the government has signed since 2009 with 29 countries, 19 of which are considered countries of convenience.
There are gaps in our tax system and plenty of tax experts of all kinds are taking it upon themselves to guide our businesses towards tax havens.
According to some experts, Canada is losing up $7.8 billion in taxes every year because wealthy individuals and big Canadian businesses are making use of tax havens.
A study by the socio-economic studies lab at the Université du Québec indicated that in 2009 and 2011, about 30 of the 100 largest Canadian companies had an effective tax rate of less than 10%. What is worse, 14 of them paid no tax, not one cent. When we take a closer look, a very high number of these companies have subsidiaries or affiliates in tax havens.
The statutory tax, that is, the combined federal and provincial tax rate for this kind of company in Canada, is 26.1%. Therefore, we have to wonder what portion of the CRA's tax loss is due to the use of tax havens by these major companies. We have to go over agreements with a fine-tooth comb to determine how they fail to prevent tax evasion and avoidance, and to find and close the loopholes that are eroding the Canadian tax base.
Another component of my motion calls on the Auditor General to evaluate, on a regular basis, the number of cases prosecuted by the CRA and the success of these prosecutions. It seems to me that this is also a priority.
The government boasts about having implemented 75 measures to fight tax havens. However, in the past six years in power, only eight people have been convicted of using tax havens.
Only eight people have been convicted out of the 4,000 people known to the CRA as a result of international disclosures concerning the use of tax havens.