Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  No, I disagree. They have the rules today to stop the acquirers of income trusts from having interest deductibility for the purpose of stripping out profits from the underlying—

Finance committee  Well, they have the means to do so, and my demand today is to have an announcement from Carol Skelton, the Minister of National Revenue, of her intent to use the rules. Germany just did a study and they found that the German multinationals—

Finance committee  No, I do not agree with that. The current thin capitalization rules apply to non-arm's-length debt, so the master limited partnerships and the U.S. foreign equity who come in to buy an income trust and who do not raise additional debt from third-party lenders expect to pay no bu

Finance committee  Good afternoon. There is no need to alter the income trust tax amendment in Bill C-52 based on any developments that have occurred since October 31, 2006, when the new income trust tax was announced. The only action that's now required is for the Canada Revenue Agency to make a

Finance committee  I think I meant Ponzi. If I said “plansi”—maybe that's an interpretation problem.

Finance committee  A Ponzi scheme, as we traditionally know it, is usually conducted by a rogue person who goes to the public and says he can pay you 12%, so you'll invest your $50,000, and then he'll go out and find other investors. He doesn't have the means to produce the 12% himself. Perhaps he

Finance committee  The proposed tax credit attempts to pay back the corporate business taxes to the people who own the corporations in their RRSPs. It's attempting to have both corporations and business tax, not withholding taxes in the form of business taxes. In my opinion, we're essentially rever

Finance committee  Thank you. The income trust tax plan removes tax advantages, and where there are tax advantages there is by definition government revenue leakage. If there were no tax advantages, there would not be this aggressive income trust lobby to reverse the income trust tax plan. If cor

Finance committee  I'd like to make three points with respect to that question.

Finance committee  Okay. You can't give credit for capital gains that are forced by conversions. You can't make a policy decision for the perpetual future on the basis of the realization of accrued gains that are from the past. When the full conversion occurs, we're not going to have those benefit

Finance committee  I just want to make the point that unless I'm not completely up to date, the CAITI members comprise the coalition of energy income trusts; Borden Ladner Gervais; PricewaterhouseCoopers; approximately six structured product investment managers; and, the last time I looked at it, f

Finance committee  I think it's roughly 20% a year. I don't think we should take comfort in that. In the prior four years we had a tripling of the energy price, and we had something like a 40% reduction in long-term interest rates. So there was very strong performance.

Finance committee  Yes, there is still $200 billion of current income trusts in the market, and 288 of the trusts are, I believe, in non-bifurcated markets--full transparency. I don't want those who know that their income trusts are overvalued having the opportunity to sell them to unsophisticated

Finance committee  We do not have a transparent market.