Public Accounts committee  I think the issue really becomes a question of relative rates of taxation. You remove the GST on providers of digital movies, for example, but you pay the GST when you go to the cinema. Those are the types of issues that one would encounter when entering that type of discussion.

Public Accounts committee  Why don't I take the question? I have a point of clarification as it relates to the pandemic. The vast majority of e-commerce transactions in Canada are subject to the GST. What we're talking about is e-commerce transactions coming from abroad. I think that's an important point

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, as you know, our role is to provide advice and analysis. We have done that consistently over the years, which I think, in all humility, the Auditor General's report points out.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, I think it's an entirely legitimate question for the finance committee to be looking at, particularly in the context of the ongoing growth and evolution of e-commerce, which I think we can all fully anticipate the pandemic will have accelerated to a degree. There are many

Public Accounts committee  Our view is that the audit was posing a policy question. As I've indicated, as the deputy minister of finance, I think it's perfectly legitimate for the Auditor General to be evaluating our capacities and our ability to undertake analysis, but at the end of the day, I don't make

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for your question. You have to bear in mind that the government collects $38 billion in GST. Many factors are involved in deciding whether to levy a tax, and we at the Department of Finance conduct a lot of analyses on this sort of subject. Ultimately, decisions about

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I need to look at that specifically. Of course, we have the GST low-income credit to deal specifically with that issue of the incidence of the GST on low-income Canadians.

Public Accounts committee  Madam Chair, could I perhaps comment in general terms on the question? We normally expect, in competitive markets.... The situation we're discussing here is that the tax actually applies, but it's just not being administered. In highly competitive markets, one would expect the a

Public Accounts committee  I actually don't have data per se on the incidence of Netflix consumption by income. We have various aspects of our tax to try to deal with progressivity, notably the progressivity of our income taxes, as you know well.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. I'll begin by thanking you for the invitation to appear before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. I am here with Andrew Marsland, as Madam Chair noted at the outset. On behalf of the Department of Finance, I want to thank the members of the committee for exam

Finance committee  In the 1980s, if one were to start from just prior to the 1981-82 recession, which was a significant one, the debt-to-GDP ratio was about 29%. The effect of the recession was to push it up significantly to about 45% by 1985-86. In the subsequent years, it continued to increase, p

Finance committee  I can confirm that we’ve had a number of discussions and good co-operation with our counterparts at Quebec’s department of finance and financial market authority, the Autorité des marchés financiers, or AMF. We are sure we have a good way to integrate the two regimes in a manner

Finance committee  An environmental lens, yes.

Finance committee  Those are the types of questions. Essentially, what are the environmental impacts if they are outside of matters that might affect greenhouse gas emissions: land preservation, impact on oceans, plastics more recently, and those types of things?

Finance committee  I'd be happy to do that. I can do so fairly briefly. For every budget proposal, the department, working with other departments, does a fairly complete environmental assessment of the individual proposals and presents those to the minister and ultimately the Prime Minister.