Thank you very much.
I'm here to change the subject. I'm here primarily because one of the contributors to this book was the president of Saint Mary's University, Dr. Colin Dodds. Some of you may know him. He basically said that this book that he's written needs to be in front of policy-makers, and that's you folks. The issue is demographic. The second issue is the complacency about the role of small business within that context.
Let's take one minute to put this in perspective. We have 1.1 million business owners in Canada who employ 90% of the private sector workforce. Somewhere between 65% and 75% of those business owners are boomers. Two-thirds of those boomer owners say they have to sell their businesses to help finance retirement. Now the issue I've seen in terms of the tax stuff they just rolled out is that all these people are so rich that we can just take money from them. There seems to be a lack of recognition that most of these savings these guys have is their retirement money.
My issue is pretty simple. If we have 65% to 75% of the total business owner population who are boomers about to retire in the next four to six years, and the critical mass of all boomers reaches 70 years of age in the year 2020—the first wave of boomers will be 75, the second wave of boomers will be 70—they are facing a situation where they have to sell, and guess what. The Business Families Foundation says 84% have no plans to sell their business, no plans to get their money out of the business, no plans for business continuation. My question is pretty simple. If, within that context, these people don't succeed, what happens to the businesses and what happens to the workers?
Now in the bigger context we have 20% of the workforce about to retire because they're boomers themselves, so all of your members are going to face some hard decisions as well. Now it's easy for a typical worker to say, “I'm going to retire”, because it's just a decision. It's not so easy if you're a business owner. You have to have some planning. Guess what. There isn't any planning process available to them.
If we look at that context, we have 84% without a plan and no one to give them a plan. Now that's not just a Canadian problem. It's a U.S. problem, it's a British problem, and it's an Australian problem. As we move into this four- or five-year period, we are about to see massive changes in economic performance, economic demand, tax base, and you name it.