Finance committee  The regressive issue is a large one. What I worry about—and again, this is coming from southwestern Ontario, from seeing the job losses in our area—is a weakened retail sector. At the end of the day somebody is going to end up paying these taxes, and Canadian consumers are increa

Finance committee  It is a little surprising, so I fully agreed with the government when they said that the GPT is out of date and needs to be updated—absolutely. It probably needed to be updated 10 or 20 years ago, and for whatever reason.... I was in high school, so I don't know why it wasn't upd

Finance committee  Well, keep in mind that the GDP—

Finance committee  Okay, so.... No, I have not been a candidate for the Green Party of Canada. Why don't I give you my entire political history? Federally I was a Progressive Conservative for a number of years.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  If it is valid, it's a very unusual one, given that we're not negotiating with the vast majority of these countries, including China and Brazil.

Finance committee  Okay, sorry.

Finance committee  After the merger, I took out a membership in the Conservative Party of Canada. I went to the first leadership convention and I voted for Mr. Tony Clement. Unfortunately, he did not win. I left the party shortly afterwards. I was in the Green Party for a while and I held a number

Finance committee  There are two criteria that the government uses, but the major one is basically where countries have more than $4,000 a year in per capita GDP. That's really small. We're talking about a number of countries whose per capita wealth is one tenth of Canada's, so they're still quite

Finance committee  It would be somewhat difficult because then they would come back and say, “Why are you including us and not including this other country that has the same per capita GDP wealth?” It would be very difficult to come up with a criterion that doesn't make it obvious that we're just

Finance committee  Keep in mind here that at the end of the day it's the importer who legally pays these tariffs. We can't tax some entity in China simply for jurisdictional reasons. The idea here is that if this does affect China somehow, the importers will say, “Well now, I have to pay this tax

Finance committee  Absolutely, the fact that we're sitting here having this discussion about what kinds of helmets this does and does not apply to, other than just having a line item that says “helmets”, indicates that this is making the tariff code more complicated.

Finance committee  Yes, absolutely. We're already seeing a great deal of cross-border shopping. Anybody who has gone to Sarnia, Ontario or to Windsor, Ontario sees first-hand the stream of cars going across the border. We say that on average the tariffs are increasing by 3%, but the increases cou

Finance committee  Yes, based on the government's logic, absolutely this will harm Canadian retailers and consumers.

Finance committee  We're Canada, so everybody focuses on hockey, but the tariff changes that were made apply to sporting equipment and sporting helmets across the board.