Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak to the committee regarding the portion of Bill C-31 that enacts FATCA in Canada. While tax law professors are generally not known for brevity, I hope to be succinct and clear in conveying two points to this commi

Finance committee  Canada has a tax treaty with the United States that goes back several decades. There is tax information exchange under it. Since 2008, I believe, or 2009, Canada has had a series of tax information exchange agreements it has signed with countries that do not have tax systems like

Finance committee  What are the consequences of not having a tax treaty? In section 241 of the Income Tax Act, disclosing confidential taxpayer information would not be authorized.

Finance committee  It seems to me, Mr. Rankin, to strain credulity to say that rounding up Canadian citizens and putting them in a pen and telling the United States that their money is here and here they are for the taking does not constitute lending assistance.

Finance committee  The mutual assistance on administration in tax matters calls information exchange a form of assistance. It is one of two forms of assistance.

Finance committee  There is no urgency. There never has been any urgency, in my mind, because Canada has been the only country on the list since before the IGAs were even conceived by the United States. The United States has used our exchange regime with them as a carrot with the rest of the world.

Finance committee  That is correct. That is what the revenue role is. That is the common law in Canada. You will find that principle in the U.S. tax treaty. You will find that principle in the mutual assistance tax treaty. You will find that in principles of public international law. Nothing should

Finance committee  No, that's one—

Finance committee  One option is to argue about who should be defined in what law. The other is to invoke an established precedent, an established rule that we have, which is about what the CRA will do, not what the Canadian financial institutions will do—they will do what FATCA says—but what the

Finance committee  There is no authorization in the act then there is no reason that I can see why you would not be risking potential liability.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. The constitutionality of this is an issue of expertise that really goes beyond my pay grade. There are privacy and discrimination concerns raised. I'd like to just state, however, that we should remember that we do not have an anti-discrimination pr

Finance committee  It's a false dichotomy. Is it this or that, or neither of them? It is not a question of whether we have to deal with FATCA. FATCA is U.S. law. The question is, what will Canada undertake to lend assistance to the United States? That is a different question. We can solve that prob

Finance committee  What are we undertaking, as a government? That's the question we need to ask.

Finance committee  I don't disagree with Mr. Berg. He's absolutely right that the banks have a choice, and they have to make their own choice as to whether or not they're going to fulfill the obligations placed upon them. I'm talking about something different. I'm talking about what the Government

Finance committee  Well, section 241 of the—