Mr. Speaker, I did say in my speech that I believe tax evaders need to be dealt with according to the law, but as we are talking about bringing investment dollars back to Canada, I will give my friend opposite this headline from Reuters from December 31, 2018: “U.S. companies repatriate over half a trillion dollars in 2018”.
I will quote the article: “The change offered a powerful incentive to bring home some of the $3 trillion U.S. firms were believed to hold in jurisdictions” outside of U.S. borders.
That is because the U.S. changed the regulation and the tax system. This way, companies were able to bring those dollars they were keeping offshore back to the United States, which would then be taxed and the country would be able to use those tax dollars to spend on the programs they chose.
We want to tax them at a fair level, but we also want to get that money back into Canada so that we can use it here, rather than having it held offshore. We say there is a difference.