Thank you very much to our guests for joining us today. I really appreciate your insights on this.
Let me just start by saying that I do hope to find a fix to ensure that we can fairly pass on farming operations, and frankly certain other kinds of businesses, to the next generation.
I have a couple of concerns about Bill C-208. I'm interested in learning more about some of the things it doesn't do and some of the things it might do that we don't want. I will acknowledge that it could accomplish the facilitation of intergenerational transfers, which I think is a good thing.
My primary concern right now really dovetails with the conversation about corporate farms versus family farms. Although I deal with it at home, even though I do have a strong agricultural presence for Nova Scotia in my riding, it comes up more often in terms of the commercial fishery. I can't tell you how important this issue is. The rural communities that sort of dot the coastline that I represent are driven, really, by the lobster fishery. One of the troubling issues we have been trying to deal with over the past number of years deals with controlling agreements. In order to protect the inshore fishery, what usually happens is that the owner of the licence will fish under that licence. It becomes a problem when certain larger corporate interests become the legal owner of a fishing vessel and associated licences, because they sometimes would be tempted to lease out the ability to fish on that licence. That has the risk of pulling the economic benefit from the rural communities, like the ones I represent, to the headquarters of the corporate entity that owns those licences.
One of the fears I have is that it could be an unintended consequence of Bill C-208 that it would encourage the adoption of corporate entities to own fishing vessels and licences, which would exacerbate this trend toward pulling the economic benefits out of communities. It's the same fear that you have expressed. I know right now that if you sell a business to a child personally rather than to a corporation owned by that child, you could benefit from, for example, the lifetime capital gains exemption.
For those unincorporated farms or fishing businesses, or frankly other businesses, do you think there are things we could do that would facilitate the transfer without putting at risk the controlling agreement circumstance? In a farming context, it would be like if a major grocer perhaps became the legal owner of the farm, rather than the person who has farmed it for generations.
If you have insight on unincorporated businesses and how we could make that simpler, I'd be very interested in hearing it.