I suspect the desire not to answer that probably speaks for itself, Mr. Chair, but I don't blame him for not wanting to.
I would like to ask about something I have asked before at committee and elsewhere of both the elected officials and you. This is the issue of the government unfairly targeting some small businesses, and it has to do with rules that determine active versus passive income and how those rules are affecting some small businesses, like campgrounds, mini-storage companies and others. I'll focus on the campgrounds because they seem to have been the ones that have been the most unfairly targeted.
It's of great concern to me because it's shutting down businesses, frankly. What is happening is that these rules around active versus passive income are being used to target small businesses like campgrounds and taking what has in the past been considered active income—and frankly should be considered active income because we're talking about businesses that provide a lot of services to their customers here—and now arbitrarily assigning to them a passive income status, and there's no doubt that that work is not passive.
They're getting these huge new tax bills and it has shut some of them right out of business. There's no question about that. It has happened.
I've asked this question a number of times and have not had an answer. Therefore, I am wondering if you could give me some sense today, how the government and therefore Canada Revenue Agency can tell some small businesses that they're too small to be a small business. The ridiculousness of that statement...it just makes no sense to me to tell a business that they're too small to be a small business. Essentially what we're telling them—what you're telling them—is that if they have more than five full-time year-round employees, they're a small business and they can have the small business tax deduction, but if they have less than that, they're too small to be a small business. We all know that in Canada there aren't a lot of campgrounds that are open year-round, so they might have five employees even in their season. In fact, many of them do, far more than that in some cases, but they don't always have them year-round.
Can you tell me why the government or the revenue agency continues to persist in trying to attack these small businesses and put them out of business? That may not be your intention but that's what you're doing.
Why is that happening? Why is it continuing to happen? What's being done to try to make sure that we're not affecting these small businesses that are really trying to just make a living?