Finance committee  Sirs et mesdames, thank you very much for this opportunity to come here to speak before your committee again. I'll have some initial comments about the treaties with Namibia, Serbia, and Poland, but really I'll confine my comments to some of the areas of controversy that have ar

Finance committee  In any event, to summarize, the best system between Canada and the U.S. is that it's probably not politically feasible, though, to negotiate that with too many other countries, including Luxembourg.

Finance committee  Thank you. By way of background, Canada only engages in ongoing automatic information exchange with one other country, the United States. As for how it works, let's say that I'm a Canadian citizen. If I move to New York City and open up a bank account with the Bank of America an

Finance committee  My understanding is that it's too soon to say. The whole notion of TIEAs was only introduced in the 2007 federal budget. They've only been ratified in the last two years. Informal discussions suggest there have not yet been effective information flows. I'm not privy to the real a

Finance committee  I agree that multilateral action and greater cooperation at the international level would certainly be helpful. In the research community there have been ongoing discussions for the last two decades about how to pull this off. Currently, Canada has signed the OECD Convention on

Finance committee  I can address that question. As I mentioned in my opening comments, I agree that the treaties are largely non-controversial. They do a lot of good stuff, as Professor Rosenbloom also mentioned. I didn't mean to suggest that the Department of Finance had rushed these particular

Finance committee  Article 25 of which treaty?

Finance committee  I am. I raised concerns about these additional amendments, or protocols, or whatever you call them. They'll become part of Canadian law once Parliament adopts Bill S-17. Traditionally, you negotiate a treaty, and then you might have a protocol to amend the treaty, but these are

Finance committee  I looked at the individual article on the exchange of information provisions. There are different ones in each treaty, and they were all consistent with article 26 of the OECD model tax convention.

Finance committee  Thank you, Chair. Sir and mesdames, thank you for this opportunity, once again, to appear before your committee. I'm a professor at Queen's University Law School, where most of my teaching and research focuses on tax law. I did want to note up front that I have had the privileg

Finance committee  —it's nothing. We're not getting anything other than the relief of the threatened economic sanctions. The Americans, in the intergovernmental agreement, give us vague assertions of reciprocity, but they will never come through. U.S. lawmakers and U.S. citizens will never accept t

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. Yes, I would agree with those constitutional law experts who suggest the IGA violates the charter, more specifically section 15, the prohibition against discrimination on the basis of national origin or citizenship. We're really creating two different

Finance committee  Canada is protected at the federal level by a piece of legislation called PIPEDA, the Personal Information Protection Electronic Documents Act. It governs the information collection practices of all private businesses within Canada, including financial institutions such as Canadi

Finance committee  It is my view. This is a very dangerous precedent. Again, it's based on a model IGA. It's the same one the Americans use for Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, and every tax haven in the world the Americans are trying to sign up. We have a unique cross-border relationship, more

Finance committee  I'm not sure what—