Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Sherbrooke for his question, which is very much on point. He is correct.
The Income Tax Act is 3,000 pages long, but not because the government thought it would be fun to add some pages. It is because people started taking advantage of the interpretation of the act, and so they took advantage of vague wording in some parts of it to find loopholes.
Since that time, the government has constantly been trying to catch up to those interpretations and loopholes, and so the pages have piled up. In the last Parliament alone, about 1,000 pages were added to the Income Tax Act, primarily interpretations by the Canada Revenue Agency concerning loopholes that had been brought forward and ways of fixing them. There is a fundamental problem in this regard. Our system is so ill-suited that we constantly have to be catching up to the people who are able to take advantage of that complexity.
We are also behind when it comes to international tax policy. There have been tax havens since the 19th century and we have never taken them seriously. The problem accelerated with computers, capital mobility, and globalization. We have never adapted to this situation. We find ourselves with an ever-increasing segment of incomes that we could have access to and that is virtually untaxed, because of this lack of agreement at the international level.
I must say, however, that from what I have seen on the part of the OECD, we are going in the right direction. It is a slow direction, unfortunately, because of the systematic obstruction that some countries, including Canada, have mounted in recent years against the efforts made by other countries. However, we are going in the right direction and I hope the present government will encourage these efforts. These efforts are essential in order to make sure that incomes are being properly taxed where they are received.