I stand before you without the luxury of political opinion. We have an organization that by its very bylaw is non-partisan, and we have illustrated for a long time now that we work with anyone. We focus on what's right, not who's right.
In our letter to the finance ministry on the budget consultations, we included a comment made in budget 2016 that said that the government was interested in removing—and I'll quote our letter—“ inefficient and ineffectual taxation measures”. We were very encouraged by that, to be honest. We responded accordingly in December and made two very specific recommendations. The first was around maintaining “personal and business tax competitiveness to enable our nation to effectively compete for financial and human capital”. In the second, we applauded the notion of simplifying or reviewing the tax regime and said, “Include tax system simplification as a key outcome in the governmental review of Canada’s tax regime”.
To be honest, this is not really what we had in mind in terms of what's come forward. I'm not in any way trying to kind of pile it on here. I recognize you've had a tremendous amount of feedback, and it's probably not been fun for many of you. Here's the thing: we honestly believe that there is a very important, thoughtful conversation that needs to take place around looking at how we have people pay tax in this country, and recognize that taxation policy is to trigger a certain human behaviour to encourage people to do one thing or discourage them from doing another. It hasn't been done thoroughly in this country for probably 25 or 30 years, and it really should be done every 10 or 15 years. We're very much in favour of that conversation, and we'd love to be part of it. What we're struggling with is that the last time changes such as those being contemplated right now were introduced was about 40-odd years ago, and it was a two-year consultation process, not 75 days introduced in the dog days of summer.
We recognize that the government has been projecting through its campaign and whatnot that it wants to go down this path. But let's be very clear: that's not consultation, and that time frame should never, ever, be included by any sitting government as part of, if you will, a respectful and formal consultation period. Our campaign all started with “Hit the Pause Button!” We're not against some of the philosophies around taxation reform, but we do think this has been awfully rushed. It started as being very prescriptive. I sense there's been a shift in the narrative a wee bit toward being a little more open to have things go forward. We actually think standing back, erasing the whiteboard, and starting again is probably the best path. We'd be delighted to be part of that conversation should the government wish to go down that path.