Finance committee  Harmonized sales tax definitely would, because you would eliminate the distortion that was referred to earlier in which one province has higher sales tax than another so that trade moves one way. If every province had the exact same sales tax rate, if you could ever get to that point, you would have the most beautiful tax system in the world, because taxes would then be eliminated from the business person's decision, and that's the key issue.

Finance committee  I was just going to make a comment that a tremendous percentage of the EU subsidies to Ireland are in the agricultural field, so if you're talking corporate taxes and comparing them, or increased productivity, economic growth, and economic subsidies, or subsidies from the EU, I think you have to be careful that you don't take a broad brush and make the simple statement that there's one cause to some economic reaction.

Finance committee  From a basic competitive position, if the tax in a particular jurisdiction on a particular good or service is all the same and the compliance costs of collecting that tax are quite reduced, competition should naturally take its own course. I'm not sure the federal government is looking to find specific industries that it would benefit; I think your objective is to benefit all industries equally.

Finance committee  At the moment, we do not believe there is any such facility in Canada, at least as far as we've been able to discover. One of the real problems that corporations have is obviously finding in-house training, continuing education programs, things of that nature. We believe that if there were a university or a community college that would take on the task of literally being a clearing house for these kinds of programs and could get the Canadian business community to be made aware of its facility, it would be a tremendous service to the business community.

Finance committee  We have never specifically taken a look at any EI issues of that nature.

Finance committee  In my personal experience, at least in Nova Scotia, the major benefit of harmonization has been the elimination of red tape, the number of auditors, the number of sales tax returns, etc., virtually all of which gets translated back into the business, especially small businesses.

Finance committee  I'd like to pick up on two points you made in that last presentation. You started off talking about tax havens. A tax haven, by definition, is a jurisdiction where taxes are lower than somewhere else. At the latter part of your presentation you equated tax haven with tax evasion.

Finance committee  I don't have any additional information. However, if we're talking about tax havens generally--and by the way, a number of jurisdictions in Canada are classified as tax havens for international investors--the issue is not whether it's tax evasion, tax avoidance, or whatever. The issue is whether the corporation or individual is complying with the law of the land, as it's written today.

Finance committee  Of course, the magnitude of the issue is something we can't discover.