Finance committee  That's why I went into a bit more detail in my statement. There are some really important negotiations taking place this year through the OECD and G20 on a fundamental reform of international corporate tax rules. The majority of the revenues lost are on the corporate side, and mo

Finance committee  Absolutely, there is a cost. We came out with a tax fairness recovery plan before the budget in which we outlined a number of ways the federal government could generate over $70 billion in additional revenues. These could then be used both for paying for the pandemic by helping t

Finance committee  It's hard to predict how much will be generated. The PBO estimates were for increased resources, particularly in the business programs. They show a strong rate of return, at five dollars for every dollar invested. Estimates from the United States show approximately a 10:1 return.

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Chair, and good morning members. There are a lot of positive measures in Bill C-30, and I'd like to commend the government for introducing them. These include the $15-an-hour minimum wage, extension of COVID and EI benefits, funding for child care, funding f

Transport committee  It's absolutely the federal government lending money at its rate. The federal government can borrow at historically low rates, and it should be doing its part to help other levels of government and the broader public sector to build the infrastructure we need. It was great to h

Transport committee  I was looking at the difference in the borrowing rates.... In fact, those differences have widened even more, so the cost for it would be even greater right now. As you all know, the federal government's borrowing rates are considerably lower. Meanwhile, with the example of the

Transport committee  Absolutely. Taxpayers are either paying the cost through their taxes—members have talked about the cost and the losses through the CIB—or else individuals and households are paying it through increased user fees. That was part of the big model for the CIB; they expected each one

Transport committee  Yes, I wrote a report four years ago saying that the Infrastructure Bank should be turned into a truly public infrastructure bank that could provide low-cost financing to help lever other public finances. In the U.K. the chancellor just announced a new national infrastructure ban

Transport committee  Absolutely, we've got things backwards on that. I thought it was great that the government identified a number of different areas that it wanted to allocate some funding for, particularly climate change, and to focus on those priorities. It should be focusing on its and Canadians

Transport committee  There have been a lot of public investment banks around the world, and we in Canada have some ourselves. The one in the U.K. was just announced. We don't really know what it's going to do. They want to rely on some private finance. I think that's a mistake. One thing they do ha

Transport committee  Thank you very much, Chair and members of the committee, and thank you for inviting me to this meeting. I'm going to start by talking about how the initial idea for the Canada Infrastructure Bank was fundamentally flawed. It involved low-cost public financing to leverage much h

Finance committee  Well there are different estimates. First of all—

Finance committee  I'm an economist and—

Finance committee  —people do different calculations of that. The figure that I cited wasn't the flow-through. That's a Canadian development expense.

Finance committee  There are flow-through shares as well. I thought that you were referring to—