It's a really important question. Carbon taxation has mixed views among Canadians, as we all know. That's equally true for Canadian small business owners.
For small firms, it is a really bad deal. The only reason why anyone could suggest that some Canadians are getting more in rebates than they're paying in the carbon tax levy—if that's true for anyone—is that other Canadians are paying but not getting anything back.
When the carbon tax was first created, the plan was that small businesses would be lumped into it. Large emitters, of course, have their own system. Small and medium-sized firms pay the carbon tax. Our estimate is that somewhere between 40% and 50% of the carbon tax revenue comes from small businesses and a few other taxpayers. Originally, only 7% of the rebate programs were targeted to go back to small businesses. It gets worse. Of that 7% that was targeted to go back to small businesses, less than 1% did go back to small firms.
The theory of the carbon tax is that you put a price on the use of carbon, and then you give it back to consumers so that they can use it for lower-carbon options. That's not true if you just pay the tax and you don't get any of the money back. For small businesses and many in the agricultural community, they pay the tax and get none of the benefits of the rebate scheme whatsoever. You can imagine that it leads to hostility towards the whole concept. Even our members who like the concept of the carbon tax really don't like the way that the federal carbon backstop is administered.