The committee was studying conflicts of interest for public office holders, hearing from Allison Christians, a tax law professor at McGill University, and Andres Knobel, a lead researcher on beneficial ownership at the Tax Justice Network.
Allison Christians testified that the Conflict of Interest Act’s disclosure language may be outdated, and suggested Parliament could look to the Income Tax Act for better information-gathering tools, such as rules on indirect ownership through affiliation and control rather than just family and friends. She stressed the importance of distinguishing tax evasion (illegal) from tax avoidance (legal), noting that both are distinct from abusive tax avoidance, which Parliament addresses through a general anti-avoidance rule. Christians recommended that if the Conflict of Interest Act is seen as insufficient, Parliament should revise statutory text to require disclosure of indirect holdings, as raised in past reviews, but declined to comment on blind trusts or ethics, deferring to her limited expertise in tax law.
Andres Knobel argued that disclosure should apply to all assets regardless of location, not just those in jurisdictions labelled as tax havens, since such lists can be political and miss major financial centres with limited transparency. He recommended using objective criteria, such as whether a jurisdiction provides public beneficial ownership data or exchanges financial information with Canada, and defining ownership to include both legal and beneficial ownership to prevent concealment through nominees or complex structures. Knobel cautioned that blind trusts are not a sufficient safeguard against conflicts of interest, advocating instead for full public transparency of underlying assets, ideally as structured, searchable data with an automated alert system to cross-check declarations against procurement or land records.
During questions, Christians reiterated that profit shifting is a global issue driven by tax competition, not information hiding, and that Canada’s tax information-sharing agreements are sophisticated, while Knobel agreed that public officials should be held to high transparency standards and that blind trusts require blind reliance from the public, which is less effective than full disclosure. Knobel also noted that Canada could improve its beneficial ownership framework to cover various asset types, enabling cross-checking of declarations, and that any prohibition on tax havens should be based on objective criteria rather than political lists.
The meeting included procedural debate and a vote on a motion regarding committee business, but no further details were provided in the transcript.
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