Madam Speaker, we in the NDP support the harmonization and simplification of tax legislation. We do not want to see companies paying double tax.
When I heard the member say that they were supporting this bill, it was going great until I heard him starting to talk about the middle-class tax break and how they are helping the middle class, because two-thirds of Canadians are not getting the benefit from that. In fact, people earning $45,000 or less get nothing. That made me nervous, actually. We were fine with this until we heard that.
In 1980 there was a tax agreement with Spain, Korea, Austria, Italy, and the tiny island of Barbados. It profoundly changed Canada. We have the biggest economic leakage in Canadian history happening right now through that tax haven.
The member for Winnipeg North, I know, comes from a riding where the median income is close to what it is in my riding, which is about $25,000 a year, and it may be lower. A lot of those people do not get anything from their middle-class tax break. Way more than two-thirds of Canadians, and about three-quarters of the people in his riding, get nothing from the middle-class tax break.
Does my colleague think that the government should propose amendments to the Canadian tax code to prevent tax cheats from using our lenient laws to avoid paying their fair share of Canadian income taxes?
As I said, we know that $5 billion to $7 billion are being lost through this treaty with Barbados that is supposed to be fair.
We know that we are entering into an agreement with Taiwan and Israel, and it should be a great agreement, but we thought that in 1980, when we signed a similar deal with Barbados.
How are we going to make sure that this is not going to be history repeating itself? We know that $5 billion to—