Finance committee  I would concur. There is no immediate crisis that I can imagine that would make it worthwhile for the Canadian government to jeopardize the independence of the Bank of Canada. The damage, long term, would be much greater than any benefit you could get in the short term.

Finance committee  Actually, other than for the fact that parity has some kind of simple “Hey, wouldn't it be nice if a dollar were a dollar?” appeal, I'd rather get away from the notion that it's some magic number. I think we should think long and hard about what to fix it at and just fix it at something.

Finance committee  Mr. Chairman, may I also chip in on this? I think it is really important to understand what's happening to manufacturing globally in advanced economies. Benchmarking ourselves against what manufacturing jobs we used to have I just don't think is useful. Whether exchange rates are low or high, in Canada and the U.S. manufacturing is just becoming a smaller part of the economy.

Finance committee  Terrific. I have just five points. First of all, a higher dollar is good, and good for the country. How high and how fast it's gotten high is another question, but I'm not despairing over the dollar being higher. Number two, being below purchasing power parity, as Andrew Jackson mentioned earlier, when purchasing power parity has stayed constant over the last 30 years, in the low 80¢ range...I think it was bad for Canada to have the dollar consistently below that, at 75¢ or below, for a decade from 1992 to 2002.

Finance committee  I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Finance committee  I agree with the last part. I just think it's a very fractured logical structure to ask the question of whether it's fair, as between people and inanimate objects. I mean, we have this notion that it's...I don't know, sort of a post-Marxist overhang thing that likes to characterize corporations as fat cats, which suggests they're animate.

Finance committee  I'm interested in the people who own corporations paying their fair share of the tax burden, definitely--the people who get dividends from them and who own corporations. You can create absolute fairness that way in taxing this intermediary.

Finance committee  Considering there was some complaint of a lack of disagreement earlier, why don't I weigh in and disagree? I think, in terms of its overall tax structure, Canada has one of the least attractive and least intelligently constructed tax structures in the industrialized world. What we've decided to do, overall, is to tax at below the OECD average, so we're not actually a high-tax jurisdiction, but we've decided to tax the things we want more of very heavily and the things we want less of lightly, and I don't think that's a good idea.

Finance committee  Yes. And in particular I mean the impact of taxation on the propensity for Canadian corporations to invest in machinery, equipment, hardware, software, innovation, building the companies. Our corporate tax rate is unhelpfully high.

Finance committee  Yes, and I would encourage you to ask the fundamental question--and I'm sure if Dr. Hines put his great analytical capability to bear on it, he'd come up with the right answer--and that is, why do we think that corporate income taxation at all is a good idea? Corporations are not animate objects; they're legal constructions.

Finance committee  The work I've done on it would suggest that we are thickening up more than we are hollowing out, so we're growing globally competitive, Canadian-owned, Canadian-headquartered companies at a much faster rate than we're losing them. That doesn't mean I'm not concerned about our Canadian companies being taken over.

Finance committee  Sure. I'll lead off. I just want to second Mr. Raizenne's comments. I really think that if you were going to set up a panel to think about this, the fundamental question before them should be how to create an internationally competitive corporate tax system for Canada. Ours now is uncompetitive, and dramatically so.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm going to take a little different tack from what I'd planned coming in here, because I don't think repeating what these very smart individuals have already said makes any sense. I agree with Mr. Pantaleo, Mr. Raizenne, and Dr. Hines on what they've said.