It has been a pleasure to work with you. Thank you very much.
Now I'll go back to the matter at hand. Mr. St-Jean, we are here to evaluate the CRA's progress in regard to tackling tax evasion. I want to go back to 2015, when Prime Minister Trudeau said that the wealthiest Canadians were using small business tax rates to reduce their tax bills. He was basically calling small business owners tax cheats.
At the time, I was one of those people out there delivering flowers to customers in the heat of the summer, sweating it away in the old Hino truck with no air conditioning, which was, according to him, nothing more than a clever tax haven. I have to say that I was really insulted, as I believe many other small business owners were.
Now here we are in 2021, and the Liberals have thrown billions of dollars at the CRA to expose these supposed small business tax cheats. I know that the CFIB said at the time that his assumptions were seriously flawed, and so far there appears to be no evidence whatsoever that he was right. Does it make any sense for the Liberals to have developed this tax policy and hired so many new staff based on those assumptions, especially when we see that the CRA makes deals with the big tax cheats but keeps going after the little guy?