I was very brief in my comments. But first of all, the lifetime capital gains exemption is available for anyone who owns Canadian-controlled private corporate shares.
In fact there are many large companies that have restructured themselves so they might create a private management company, in which the managers--who could be people quite wealthy, actually--end up claiming the lifetime capital gains exemption for their shares, because it's a Canadian-controlled private corporation, when they sell off their shares within that private corporation.
But the problem that I have with the lifetime capital gains exemption is that it only is available for private corporate shares. So if you become public, you can crystallize and fully claim your exemption, but effectively, sometimes if you haven't built up enough capital gains yet, then you may want to keep the company private.
What I'm suggesting is that I think we need to start thinking about incentives for small businesses that would allow them to grow. An example I was always struck with was in the United States when they gave a half capital gains tax treatment for investors holding initial public offerings of small companies, and small companies were defined as up to $60 million in assets, the last time I looked at the rules. There was a study done at Harvard that indicated that investors actually got about half the benefits of that and the company got half the benefits in terms of a lower cost of capital. But it was interesting, as it was an incentive to actually encourage companies to go public, as opposed to what I see as an incentive to keep small.