Well, I haven't taken a poll to talk about political views on it, but I think what your point raises goes back, I think, to the heart of the question: What's the point of the business subsidies in the first place?
Today we're hearing a lot about the positive stuff. Even I would argue that supporting innovation is an appropriate thing to do. You need to have, actually, an ecosystem for innovation, which includes a whole bunch of things. It's not just the grant itself. I think a number of things have been done right in Canada, although I would say that right now our personal tax system is a serious issue in terms of discouraging innovation. In fact, some of the calculations I've shown—and I can give those to your committee, if you'd like—show that small businesses in the United States are now taxed less heavily than large businesses, once you include not just the corporate income tax but also the personal income tax. It's important to keep that in the count.
To get to your point specifically, it goes to the question: What's the point of the subsidy? I totally agree with you. I don't see any economic rationale that Loblaws needed to get a subsidy to buy some refrigerators. They could do it themselves. The question is that this was a climate change policy. If you have a proper carbon tax and a carbon price, which we now have in Canada, Loblaws will make that investment itself in order to reduce some of the carbon costs.
That's all you need to do. We don't need to have all these subsidies thrown around. I think this one was really quite wrong.