I know you miss me, Mr. Chair. You'll miss me even more when I'm gone.
The unfortunate fact is that this is a pre-budget consultation and all we're talking about is one proposal that's been thrown out there by the Department of Finance.
I want to make a comment, and if any of you want to comment on my comment, you're welcome to. I want to come back to this comment that there's a lot of misinformation out there, which we hear all the time. I have some quotes here: farmers and physicians won't be affected by this, and small business owners won't be affected; only those making $150,000 will be affected. Bill Morneau made those comments. Then as we all know, the Prime Minister, in the election campaign, was quoted as saying that small businesses are nothing more than simply tax writeoffs.
Is there any wonder there's anger out there? Is there any wonder there's misinformation out there when we hear these kinds of comments? Then there's someone else in the room who recently said, “Whoever drafted [that proposal] doesn’t have a clue about the amount of effort that goes into being a small business or how it’s established.”
I'd just like to know if anyone would like to make a comment on this continued wording that's used by the government about how somehow we're all misinformed, that we don't know what's going on, that it knows what's going on, but we're all misinformed out here.
Dan, kick it off.