Our analysis of where corporate profits are coming from, and where they're going, has looked at both the higher margins during 2021, and how much tax these companies were paying compared with how much you would expect them to pay, given the tax rates. We found that in 2021, there was about $30 billion in total corporate tax avoidance.
This is money that remains in the hands of the predominantly largest, most powerful, and already most profitable companies that have conjoined this reduction in their effective tax rates with even higher profit margins.
As they're jacking up their profit margins, those profits have to come from somewhere. They're coming from predominantly smaller businesses, which—as Mr. Bourbeau said about restaurants—can't pass along the higher costs they're facing, and they're also coming out of the pockets of Canadians.
These are really two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, you have these higher profit margins. It's corporations doing what they're always going to do. People shouldn't act surprised that this is happening, but they have a right to be outraged. On the other side of the coin, they're trying to push their tax rates ever lower through whatever means they can leverage.