The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that Mark Carney is being dogged by questions regarding his time at Brookfield Asset Management, and the fact he co-chaired investment funds worth about $25-billion registered in Bermuda, a tax haven. Guest columnist Allan Lanthier writes that the Liberal leader says the tax strategy was designed to benefit Canadian pension plans and that there was no avoidance of tax. The former is true, but the latter is not. Booking profits in a tax haven is indeed tax avoidance. If a Canadian public company owns a subsidiary in Bermuda, there is no tax in Bermuda when business income is earned. Nor is there Canadian tax when the Canadian parent company receives dividends from its Bermuda unit because of a controversial change introduced in 2007 by finance minister Jim Flaherty: Dividends received from tax-haven subsidiaries are exempt from Canadian tax provided the country in question has signed a tax information exchange agreement with Canada. If Canadian pension plans have invested in the public company and receive dividends from it, the dividend income is free from tax as well. Of course, payments to pensioners will eventually be taxed, but that may be 30 or 40 years down the road.