Thanks to the witnesses for being here today.

I think this is an interesting study. One of the most interesting things about it, I think, is that we have a bit of a fundamental problem here.

Generally taxes are a good thing. If we didn't have taxes in our society, we wouldn't be able to pay for health care, we wouldn't be able to pay for education, we wouldn't have roads to drive on, we wouldn't have bridges to cross, we wouldn't have sanitation and we wouldn't have water. We wouldn't have any of these things, nor would we have the money to address things of common concern like putting money into research into diseases that affect us or putting money into addressing climate change, which seems to affect us all. There are very definite benefits that come to our society from taxation.

I know within the indigenous community that there are all kinds of available taxes like the first nations sales tax and the first nations goods and services tax. There's the real property tax under the First Nations Fiscal Management Act, and apparently and most interesting to me, 14 self-governing aboriginal groups have enacted income tax.

I think that, pretty clearly, this is money that can be used for the betterment of indigenous communities. The fundamental problem is that we seem to be having trouble finding chiefs to come and talk to us about this because—do you know what?—it's not really popular when you impose a tax. Nobody wants to be taxed, including me. If you asked me, “Hey, Marcus, I'm gonna start taking $20,000 more a year in your taxes; how are you going to like that?”, I'm going say, “No thanks. Keep the taxes as they are. I don't like that.”

Maybe, Dr. Ottmann, you can start off by talking about it. What is the very real obstacle? I think, and you realize, that first nations can use their tax authority to their advantage; however, you're relying on political leadership to potentially bear the cost of imposing those taxes. I'm sure there's a trade-off, and maybe you can wax philosophically about this issue for me.

Marcus Powlowski

$573,514.00