Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to everyone who's come here today and has provided some good stuff to think about.
I've sat down with a number of tax experts over the last couple of weeks. I spent half of my Labour Day going over all the proposals in the consultation paper. I understand that tax fairness is important and how we need to get it right. I think the spirit of tax fairness and the road we're on the right path.
We need to ensure our tax system has the right incentives in place to encourage capital formation and to encourage small businesses to grow, not to just stay at the 15% level but to move up to the 26% level on taxation, which is a good thing, because it shows that businesses are succeeding. We also need to ensure that we have the right proposals in place.
I've looked at this consultation paper as being in two buckets in terms of—I think someone alluded to this—the professionals and what I would deem as the small businesses like your manufacture and your engineering firm. We don't want to impede the second bucket from doing what they're doing. They're doing things very well in Canada. We have a growth rate of 3.2% this year, the best in the G7. We've created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and I attribute that to a lot of SMEs investing in their businesses and hiring Canadians.
In looking at the buckets, two of them, I think, do have merit. One is extending the income sprinkling not just to include income, because that's already covered, but to also include dividends, because if someone is working for an organization or farm, they can still work for them and they'll still be paid. Now, there's some clarification needed around “reasonableness” and “continuous” and words like that, and on the conversion of dividends to capital gains, and the multiplication of lifetime capital gains exemption. There are some things there that do have a lot of merit in the initial set.
On passive income, obviously a lot of questions need to be answered. I represent an area where we have 13,000 private businesses. York region is very dynamic. There's a lot of growth is going on, driven by private business. I know that we're consulting. I'm consulting. I speak to business owners every day. I know that our government's consulting. I encourage everyone to submit a brief by October 2.
Mr. Kelly, don't you agree there is merit in those first two measures, on examining them in the spirit of tax fairness, which we really need to do?