Finance committee  I love your question. I think it's a terrific question, and I wish I had an hour, but I know I only have a minute. To follow up on the last comment, “as long as politics...”, when you have people standing up and talking about tax evasion, tax havens, multinationals not paying t

Finance committee  Without question it is. The fact that Canadian companies are as competitive as they are in the global economy, with all of the measured benefits this situation has had on Canada by way of raising our GDP and raising our income per capita, has generated additional tax revenue. OFC

Finance committee  That's a lot of pressure. But one thing I would say is that the returns are taxable, so.... Anyway, that was a joke. As we talked about corporate tax rates going down and moving us in the right direction, we know that reducing taxes, corporate and personal, move us in the direct

Finance committee  When you think about tax evasion—and again, as my colleague in Montreal put it, we can't measure it—the vast majority of tax evasion, the vast majority of lost tax revenue in Canada, I would guess, is done by Canadians in Canada doing home improvements and other things and not by

Finance committee  May I take two minutes, or is that too long?

Finance committee  I would say yes. With all of the loss in jobs and the movement of production facilities out of Canada, the last thing we want to do is make it more expensive for companies to locate within the Canadian environment. So I agree with you, yes.

Finance committee  I would argue that the government is going in exactly the right direction. It's hard to say what the right rate should be. The reason is that there's a big distinction between statutory rates and effective rates, with the deductions, and so on, that corporations have. I would a

Finance committee  Yes, I would. These big multinational corporations, the big Canadian corporations and the banks, for example, are very widely held. When corporate tax cuts go to the big corporations, what do they do with the additional revenue? They pay it out to shareholders. When they pay it

Finance committee  Yes, many people decide to declare themselves non-resident and then the income they earn in a global economy becomes non-taxable. As a Canadian, if someone decides to do that and then moves to an offshore jurisdiction, they're not breaking any law and it's legitimate. But there's

Finance committee  The hypothetical is that income earned in Canada is somehow transferred to an affiliate in an offshore jurisdiction, or intellectual property, or R and D, or patents, and that kind of thing. It would become evading taxes when people use these creative structures to move these ass

Finance committee  Yes. The reason this is important is that when you have a Canadian company operating in a country like China, you have banks and other companies from other OECD-developed countries also operating in China. These other companies have access to financial structures that are similar

Finance committee  If you have enough money that you want to set up a structure to avoid paying income taxes, I think you have enough money. It's just not worth it. Any initiative by the Canadian government or the OECD to crack down on that kind of activity should be done in a way to minimize the

Finance committee  Limiting the ability of Canadian companies to use these offshore jurisdictions for legitimate purposes would negatively impact the competitiveness of the Canadian economy, and the banks in particular. One thing I should note is that about 40% of Canadian investment abroad is actu

Finance committee  I'm sorry. We've had many speakers come to the Rotman School and talk about how anyone who wants to have a new venture that would likely experience a significant capital gain should move to an offshore jurisdiction and set up a structure there. Do the activity in Canada, but hav

Finance committee  We know there's a significant prosperity gap between Canada and the U.S. There are lots of reasons for that, one of which has to do with innovation and R and D. Even though the Canadian government is one of the most generous in the developed world when it comes to subsidizing R a