over 65 (the "age amount") is based, and new rules to allow senior couples to split pension income in order to reduce the income tax they pay. Flaherty said these changes were designed to mitigate the impact on seniors of the new income trust rules. The legislation to implement these proposals was included in the 2007 federal budget, which was presented to Parliament by Jim Flaherty on March 19, 2007. Department of Finance role in decision While at the Department of Finance, Mark Carney engineered the federal Conservative government's plan to tax income trusts at source. Carney was a Senior Associate Deputy Minister of Finance, and expected to succeed David A. Dodge as the Governor of the Bank of Canada on February 1, 2008. Carney was appointed by Finance Minister Flaherty on October 4, 2007. The Department of Finance also eliminated a 15% withholding tax on foreign leverage buyout loans, and created capital insertion rules that restrict growth on Canadian trusts. Brent Fullard claimed that this creates conditions which favour foreign entities who purchase Canadian income trusts and are not required to comply with rules that restrict growth. that constituted Mark's idea of accountability and transparency." Support The Conservatives had the support of the Jack Layton and the New Democratic Party, and a majority of provincial finance ministers on this issue. The Conservatives lost Bloc Québécois support because of Bloc concerns of capital losses to small Canadian investors. Jack Mintz of the C.D. Howe Institute noted in a December 2004 brief that the dividend tax credit changes were not sufficient to level the playing field between income trusts and corporations, and that the tax system continued to distort the efficiency of capital markets. Further, he wrote that "The tax system encourages excessive distributions since trusts that retain taxable profits are subject to onerous taxation." The C.D. Howe Institute issued a report in October 2006 in which Mintz indicated that since 2004 "the income trust market has grown by about a third from $62 billion to $83 billion in issuance". He estimated that the total reduction in federal and provincial taxes to be $700 million annually, and that with the proposed conversion by BCE and Telus to trusts, the total federal and provincial tax reductions for investors would rise to $1.1 billion annually. In a November 2006 The Globe and Mail's survey of business leaders (CEOs, CFOs and the like), 58%