Finance committee  It's certainly true that the reasonableness test is not new. In fact, it already applies to salaries and fees, so there's a long experience in CRA. In fact, it's not a particularly arduous process. CRA provides a lot of flexibilities to families in terms of salaries and fee payme

Finance committee  I agree that the goal of the small business tax rate is to do one thing, and one thing only. It's to incentivize reinvestment of profits in the business, if profits are made. It was never designed to be a retirement savings plan, although that's how it's been used. That use has b

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to attend this morning. Of the three measures proposed, given the time, I'd like to constrain my comments to the income sprinkling portion, although I'm happy to respond in the question period to

Finance committee  One of the interesting things about gathering more data would be to compare traditional versus P3 models on similar projects, to see which ones perform better over the long term in terms of costs and completion rates and so on. An infrastructure bank like this could do that. It'

Finance committee  I would actually disagree with regard to the private contracts that the P3s are putting together. Those private contracts are private. Therefore transparency becomes a huge issue when we are trying to evaluate them after the fact.

Finance committee  I think one of its primary goals could be to lower borrowing costs, although Matti is certainly right that there are provincial authorities that do that to some degree already. I think one of the real downsides is that if its goal is not to reduce borrowing costs, it could in fac

Finance committee  There's no necessary relationship between P3s being located in Canada and the investors being in Canada. Certainly the CPPIB, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, is one of the big investors in P3s in Canada, but P3s are just as likely to be located in tax havens, for instan

Finance committee  Maybe we'll see. There is probably broad agreement that the costs of the infrastructure bank should be borne by the infrastructure borrowers at the end of the day. It's a real question for this committee as to this bank's goal. Is it to reduce interest rate costs, to use the posi

Finance committee  I think nothing is stopping municipalities from getting additional partners to come together on projects. The real question is what role the infrastructure bank will or won't play in that. If the infrastructure bank forces you into a project with a 10% interest rate instead of p

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Easter, and thanks so much to the committee for their invitation to speak on Bill C-44. With any budget implementation bill there is always something interesting to say and plenty to say about it. Briefly, I would like to commend this committee on Bill

Finance committee  Yes, I wrote a report on this two years ago, which I presented to the finance committee at that time. About 70% of the top 1%, the very high end, have a TFSA, but as Alex pointed out, only about 30% of them maximize it. This is based on 2013 levels, which have since increased. We

Finance committee  Sure. I think it's important to differentiate poverty from income inequality. There are certainly some very positive measures in this budget that address poverty specifically. But that, I think, is different from income inequality, which does focus more on the middle class. Is th

Finance committee  It is pretty clear that with growing TFSA limits, whether at $5,000 or $10,000 or back at $5,000, the larger issue is what the lifetime limit of TFSA holders is. I think that will become an issue later on, as you face exactly that problem. This is skewed heavily towards the wealt

Finance committee  Thanks for the question. Certainly, progressivity is an important feature of any income tax system, and the more you switch away from income taxes towards other types of taxes, such as on consumption, the more you end up with less progressivity in the system rather than more. So

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I timed it to five minutes. Hopefully I can keep it to that this time around. I'd like to thank the committee today for their invitation to speak. There are certainly a great many interesting topics that emerged from this year's budget. The focus on on-rese