Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to quickly make a couple of comments to Mr. Foley and Mr. Taucer.
In a previous life I was a health minister in Alberta, and if there's one thing that drove me crazy, it was the fact that the medical profession didn't work as groups. I think the advancement that you've made in the last decade or so has been phenomenal in terms of providing that kind of care to the patient. We could get into a pretty good debate with my friends across the way here about these things.
Mr. Foley, you said a couple of times that these are accidental, unintended consequences. We had finance officials here last week, and I don't think it was accidental. In fact, in listening to some of the questions that are coming from the government side, I'm convinced it's not accidental. I'm convinced that this is the beginning of how this government is going to move into small business taxation. We have a budget, but first we had an election where the Prime Minister not only said that they were going to increase taxes a little bit higher on the high-income earners; he also said that small businesses in many cases were nothing more than a tax dodge.
Now in this budget, where we did not have, as promised in the election campaign, a reduction in the small business tax, we are now seeing a tax coming on for small businesses. For Mr. Grewal, who unfortunately isn't here, we're going to see with the Canadian Medical Association and their presentation in the next group that, as an example, in the province of Nova Scotia the tax rate goes from 13.5% to 31%. That's hardly hundreds of dollars.
I think, with all due respect, gentlemen, if this gets changed, it's going to be because of the work of people on this side of the table, and because of people like you. It is not an accident, and if it doesn't get changed that will prove me correct. I see Mr. Champagne sitting right next to you who can take that back to the finance minister.
Those are my comments regarding that. I'm not sure if you want to make any other comments, but I would suggest that this is this year, and next year it's going to be groups of general practitioners or other medical professionals. I think this is a trend that's going to happen.