I'll take that first. Jasmin, you may want to add something afterwards.
Carbon taxes for small businesses, as Jasmin pointed out earlier, have been very unfair at the federal government level. As we've talked about, half of those revenues come from small businesses. A little bit of that is from what they call the “MUSH” sector—municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals. That's about 8% of that 50%. They are only supposed to get back only about 8% to 10%. However, that's never really been returned to small businesses. It's still sitting, as far as I understand, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, with government. It's been accumulating over the course of the last few years as the carbon tax has been collected.
Initially, that money was supposed to go into programs to help small businesses become more energy-efficient. However, only one program was ever introduced, and that was prior to the pandemic. The threshold to actually access the program required you to invest $80,000 to get any money back. Most small businesses don't have $80,000 to invest in energy-efficient equipment. We had been told that they were going to create a second program that would have a much lower threshold to allow access from smaller businesses. That never happened. COVID hit. Since then, there has been nothing available to small companies.
What needs to be done first and foremost with the federal carbon tax is to make it more fair for smaller companies. If they're investing 50% into the carbon tax, they need to get back at least that same amount.
Most of that money, as we know, is going to consumers in the form of a rebate. However, for small companies, the amounts that have accumulated, which are supposed to go back to them, are still sitting with government. That is the major crux of the problem for us.
Of course, the fact that it's going up every year is another cost issue. Many of them are going to have to figure out a way to absorb that increase. We had called for them to freeze the carbon tax this year, if for no other reason than to just allow them an opportunity to breathe before they had to figure out how they were going to absorb these costs into their particular companies. Of course, that didn't happen.
That's essentially where we'd like to see the carbon tax go in the future. It's to figure out a way to make it fairer for smaller companies and potentially to freeze it if we're still in the situation of struggling with debt and other costs.