I have been buying RRSPs. I am deferring my taxes as well, but I am avoiding taxes and I am doing it legally. I plan to continue to do it.
My point is that tax planning is legitimate. The government puts in a number of rules to encourage us to plan in certain ways. RRSPs are designed to help people save for their retirement. It is a tax planning measure that allows people to avoid taxes, encouraging them to put aside money for when they retire.
There is a difference between that and tax evasion. Tax evasion is doing something illegal to not pay taxes. There are no rules. People are evading taxes.
Our government has not criticized any of our citizens for tax evasion. There is nothing wrong with tax planning. What happens at times is that certain structures that are designed to encourage certain behaviour also encourage other behaviours that the government may or may not want. When that happens, the situation is looked at and addressed. That is what the government has been doing in this case. It has been looking at whether certain rules are being used in certain ways that were unforeseen. This happens all the time. It happens when any law is introduced. It is the law of unintended consequences. That is what our finance minister is trying to deal with today.
The motion purports that the finance minister is looking to help a company with which he used to be involved. That is not the case at all. The case is looking at a tax planning strategy that is used in the ways we want it to be used, but also in ways we do not want it to be used.
The key point is that anybody involved in tax avoidance through proper planning is not a tax cheat, is not doing anything illegal, is using the rules to his or her benefit. There is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong when people are involved in tax evasion, but we are not seeing that tax evasion. This has happened but why does it happen? Because tax rules are complex.
Taxing involves putting something in place and expect a certain outcome, but at times other things happen. The rules are looked at after a while and we see certain behaviours we want to encourage, but we also see a few other behaviours we do not want to encourage. When that happens, we look to make certain changes.
The finance minister is working on exactly that. He is not looking to attack anybody. He is not looking to denigrate any part of our society. He is not looking to attack farmers or physicians. He is not looking to attack anybody.
He is simply looking at tax strategies that are working in ways that we do not want to encourage in certain key instances. That is all of it.
This government's commitment is to the middle class and, it should be underlined, those working hard to join it, absolutely. Most of our 1.8 million Canadian-controlled private corporations are very small businesses and they are the middle class. Our government is committed to not do anything to hurt those businesses, and we are working diligently in that direction. This paper does not talk about any of those issues. It does not bring up one measure that has been proposed by the finance minister with which it is in disagreement. This brings up character assassination.
It is the job of the opposition to critique the laws that are being proposed. It is the job of the opposition to say that something proposed in the government's tax changes is not correct. However, we are not seeing that. We are not seeing the opposition doing its job. We are seeing the opposition members engaging in character assassination instead of saying they see a problem with the way farms are being targeted. Fair enough; let us hear it, but we do not have it here—
