Canadian Heritage committee  We have, I believe, five or six members as our board of directors right now. They're all volunteers. I believe there are now two women and three men, or two and four. I don't know what other kind of—

Canadian Heritage committee  No, I think there are going to be costs involved. I'm simply saying that we have to always have the cost up front and in mind when we're making these types of decisions.

Canadian Heritage committee  No, no. We have one lawyer. We have an accountant. We have someone who runs a public relations firm. We have someone who works in government relations. We've had people from all walks of life sit on our board. When we say that we're the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the choice of the word “taxpayer” is really to emphasize the fact that people pay taxes and expect services in return.

Canadian Heritage committee  Maybe 10%. There are business people who support our organization, but I couldn't give you a percentage.

Canadian Heritage committee  That was the CFIB's number.

Canadian Heritage committee  I do not.

Canadian Heritage committee  I don't know how you'd begin to quantify that. Obviously, reconciliation is an important goal. I don't think there's anybody who disputes that. The question is how you would quantify the impact of not having a holiday on the ability for Canadians to experience reconciliation.

Canadian Heritage committee  No. If that were the case, if we were only going to have holidays on that basis, we wouldn't have any at all.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. It's not just about dollars and cents. I'm simply noting that there is a cost involved with that, and we can't ignore that fact. Also, as I pointed out in my remarks, can we achieve these objectives with or without this holiday? I think that's a fair question.

Canadian Heritage committee  That sounds high. I think it's somewhere in between the two figures I quoted. The cost to the federal payroll would be $195 million. There's obviously a cost to private employers as well. I think you're probably looking at figure somewhere between $200 million and $3.6 billion.

Canadian Heritage committee  Madam Chair, good morning, and thank you to the committee for the invitation. My name is Aaron Wudrick, and I am the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. We are a non-profit, non-partisan advocacy group with over 140,000 supporters across Canada. Our advocacy is centred on three areas: lower taxes, less waste and government accountability.

Finance committee  Frankly, it's that the government has a credibility issue. Look, we were one of the groups for the longest time calling for tax reform. I don't want to suggest we're against it. However, we stipulated that the condition must be that the money has to be returned in the form of cutting broad-based tax rates.

Finance committee  We don't have a lot of aggregate data. I certainly have more emails than I care to remember. I think I've been personally copied on at least 300 or 400 submissions to the finance minister. That's certainly on a scale that we haven't seen before. Aside from the dollars-and-cents issue, I think it's important to stress—and I hope the government is aware of this—that a lot of the folks feel personally vilified.

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and as always, thank you very much to the committee for the invitation. I have some good news for the committee. I did not provide a pre-budget submission this year. That is because the government did not see fit to adopt any of our recommendations from last year, so you've saved me the time.

Finance committee  I think we can all agree right now that the economy is in slow-growth mode. This government has stated repeatedly that its objective is to boost growth, so I think not removing those would not be in service of that objective. This government was elected on a platform of change. If it's going to do business the same way as all previous governments, I don't really think it's keeping true to that.