Finance committee  It wasn't clear. You said we had not received an opinion.

Finance committee  Yes. I'm sorry. It was probably I who said that, and that was true then, and it is true now. It's not our understanding that the Privacy Commissioner offers opinions on proposed legislation.

Finance committee  We've kept the Office of the Privacy Commissioner informed and involved in discussions throughout this, including sharing the draft legislation with them.

Finance committee  It is our understanding that the FATCA would have raised potential privacy issues because that involved a foreign law ostensibly requiring the provision of information from Canadian financial institutions in relation to Canadians. There certainly seemed to be a privacy issue the

Finance committee  My understanding is that the Privacy Act allows for other laws of Canada, other acts of Parliament, to be read together.

Finance committee  My understanding is that another law of Parliament can be read together with the Privacy Act so that the Privacy Act will not be in conflict with it.

Finance committee  Thank you. I think it's a very important question. To be clear to this committee, I don't think it is the case that it was a question of whether to do this intergovernmental agreement or nothing. It was a question of how this intergovernmental agreement would compare relative to

Finance committee  I would agree with that. I think for them and their clients it's certainly not, in their view, something perfect from the financial institutions' perspective, but I think it's much better.

Finance committee  Well, it doesn't raise the conflict of laws issue that we talked about earlier. I believe that's true.

Finance committee  First of all, the U.S. sought as much as possible to have identity in the agreements they negotiated with every country. Understandably, if they're trying to negotiate with the world, and I think they've signed as of today 30 of these agreements, they weren't much minded to be ve

Finance committee  As opposed to FATCA itself applying, there would have been many more issues and a much higher compliance burden in that circumstance. So on that measure, yes, they were much better off. We are much better off as a result of this agreement.

Finance committee  Actually, this question only came up quite recently, and we hadn't considered it before. As a result of subsequent discussions, we've learned that the U.S. hadn't considered it before either. But having received the question, it was good to try to sort through the answer. The se

Finance committee  On the grants themselves, and the earnings thereon, my understanding of the answer we've received is that those are taxable on receipt by the beneficiary.

Finance committee  That's right. That's my understanding.

Finance committee  Yes. The specific question we've had a discussion with the U.S. about was in relation to the grants themselves. On that, they've said that because of the conditionality of it, it's not clear that these will go out to the beneficiary. They would be included in income for U.S. tax