Finance committee  You take a capital loss on the assets that you put in.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  It's certainly a constraint on raising taxes when you reduce the base; you get people who leave the country, or go from one province to the other. There's not a whole lot of evidence about the responsiveness of raising the rate in terms of international migration. There are many

Finance committee  It depends on what you mean by tax increases. You can get a tax increase out of top income people by raising the rate, or you can get a tax increase by broadening the base. I have stronger views about broadening the base than I do about increasing the rates. There's plenty of roo

Finance committee  I made one or two proposals that were kind of addressing this issue obliquely. One of them had to do with taking all non-refundable tax credits—personal credit, spousal credit, age credit, credit for dependants, and so on—and turning them into refundable credits. There is no reas

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. You're not talking about simplicity now; you're talking about fairness, as I understand it.

Finance committee  [Inaudible—Editor]

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. I think it's easy to overestimate the incentive consequences of general transfers like the Canada social transfer and the Canada health transfer because they're unconditional, and they're not contingent on what any one province does. How you use those

Finance committee  Thank you for your question, I think. On simplifying the tax system, the general mantra of an economist, probably even an accountant and a tax lawyer, would be that a simpler tax system is a tax system that has a broader base and doesn't have a lot of exemptions. For example, t

Finance committee  Thank you very much for that question, which is a very challenging and difficult one. I agree completely. The complexity of the tax system gives rise to opportunities for tax planning. At least some of my proposals are motivated by removing opportunities for tax planning—tax pla

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question. I hope I got exactly what you were saying. I was very much opposed to increasing the limit on TFSAs from $5,500 to $10,000, largely on the basis that it would benefit mainly people in the very high income groups. When we're facing a situatio

Finance committee  Thank you for inviting me, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. What I'd like to do is make a number of comments on three general areas having to do with tax policy. The first area is the growing inequality of income and wealth and what measures should complement the announc

Finance committee  Thank you. The first suggestion would be to offset the benefits that the middle tax rate cut affords the higher income groups by increasing the tax rates in the third and fourth brackets. Next, to help those at the bottom of income distribution and to facilitate a transition to

Finance committee  Indeed. They're not available to people who are in a non-taxpaying position.