Finance committee  I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak today. My name is Mike Moffatt. I'm a professor in the business, economics and public policy group at the Richard Ivey School of Business. I have researched and taught international trade for a number of years at Ivey.

Finance committee  Sure. These tariff increases are on thousands and thousands of products. Just imagine an example. You get up in the morning and you brush your teeth; well, there's now a higher tariff on the toothbrush. You go downstairs, you get your newspaper that's lying on the doormat; well,

Finance committee  Yes. The 9948 exemption may or may not apply to these items depending on whom you ask.

Finance committee  The system as it stands right now is already incredibly complex. Whenever the Auditor General looks at this, which goes back 20 or 30 years, he or she finds somewhere between one in five to one in three of these products being classified incorrectly by the importer. You have impo

Finance committee  A little bit. My larger concern is the fact that tariffs are going up on thousands and thousands of items, increasing prices for Canadian consumers. Certainly, this isn't helping those red tape issues.

Finance committee  It's very strange, because the countries that we're in trade negotiations with, such as those in the EU, aren't affected by this plan, and countries that are affected, such as China and Brazil, we're not in trade negotiations with. If you imagine a Venn diagram, that little overl

Finance committee  Absolutely, the fact that we're sitting here having this discussion about what kinds of helmets this does and does not apply to, other than just having a line item that says “helmets”, indicates that this is making the tariff code more complicated.

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. We're already seeing a great deal of cross-border shopping. Anybody who has gone to Sarnia, Ontario or to Windsor, Ontario sees first-hand the stream of cars going across the border. We say that on average the tariffs are increasing by 3%, but the increases cou

Finance committee  Yes, based on the government's logic, absolutely this will harm Canadian retailers and consumers.

Finance committee  We're Canada, so everybody focuses on hockey, but the tariff changes that were made apply to sporting equipment and sporting helmets across the board.

Finance committee  There are two criteria that the government uses, but the major one is basically where countries have more than $4,000 a year in per capita GDP. That's really small. We're talking about a number of countries whose per capita wealth is one tenth of Canada's, so they're still quite

Finance committee  It would be somewhat difficult because then they would come back and say, “Why are you including us and not including this other country that has the same per capita GDP wealth?” It would be very difficult to come up with a criterion that doesn't make it obvious that we're just

Finance committee  Keep in mind here that at the end of the day it's the importer who legally pays these tariffs. We can't tax some entity in China simply for jurisdictional reasons. The idea here is that if this does affect China somehow, the importers will say, “Well now, I have to pay this tax

Finance committee  Well, keep in mind that the GDP—

Finance committee  Okay, so.... No, I have not been a candidate for the Green Party of Canada. Why don't I give you my entire political history? Federally I was a Progressive Conservative for a number of years.