Finance committee  It has an accrued gain on it already.

Finance committee  It's an interesting point, at least as far as I understand it so far. The tax-free savings plans aren't in any way integrated with the limits that exist on RRSP contributions or registered pension plans. It's just an additional amount. So it really opens up an additional massive vehicle of tax-free savings for high-income people.

Finance committee  First of all, I'm at a law faculty. I don't do any modelling; I talk. You may have noticed that. As I responded to the question about carbon taxes, I think the practical implications of these things are important. You guys have to take them into account. When I write, I try to take them into account too.

Finance committee  I'm not a fan of that. I remain a fan of individual taxation, however, with the following exceptions. We have these attribution rules that I actually think don't respect individual taxation. Individual taxation treats individual ownership and entitlement to property and income seriously, and the attribution rules actually reject that.

Finance committee  I think this is where you'd have to have presumptions about the carbon content in the import that would have to be based on rough figures from wherever the origin of the product is, and what kind of energy sources they're using, and presumptions about the energy sources that are built into the products.

Finance committee  Well, I guess the counter-argument sometimes--and I haven't studied this in detail--would be that it's a cost of doing business, like any other cost of doing business. So it should be treated as a deduction. I see it has these federal-provincial implications.

Finance committee  I agree. I wrote about the fines and thought it was a terrible decision when the Supreme Court did that. But the rationale is different from that for a royalty. You're not killing anybody by....

Finance committee  I agree, and I think it can probably be revenue neutral and certainly advantageous.

Finance committee  I'm not an expert in trade law, but that's why I've mentioned this ozone-depleting substances tax that the U.S. introduced. They had a domestic tax on ozone-depleting substances and wanted to make sure their industries weren't at a competitive disadvantage to imports. That was considered to be acceptable under the GATT at the time, I think, not the World Trade Organization.

Finance committee  People say that. People say Germany doesn't really produce any oil, so they've had an easier time satisfying the emission standards and they're importing from other countries that are burning coal or whatever. I think that's one of the rationales for trying to think of this as a destination-based tax rather an origin-based tax, which is the way we've generally thought of carbon taxes.

Finance committee  They have done a good job on wind power and a variety of other things.

Finance committee  No, I'm not.

Finance committee  The key is that you said “small inheritance”. That's the key, right? The key thing is that these taxes should only apply to very substantial estates that are transferred from one generation to the next. In fact, I was speaking a couple of weeks ago in connection with a debate in the U.S. right now about a gift and estate tax they have that is repealed in one year but comes back into existence in 2011.

Finance committee  It's true that the potential for protectionist uses of that carbon tax or tariff could be a problem, particularly when you're imposing a tax on the embedded carbon content—and it's often hard to trace exactly what that is. There is a precedent for this in the U.S., I think, with the import tax they imposed on ozone-depleting substances, when they had a tax on ozone-depleting substances to help phase out those substances.

Finance committee  I would say that if it had been accomplished by harmonizing with the provinces, then it would have been a decent policy trade-off.