This is also my first time at the finance committee. It's great to see so many colleagues here today talking about such an important bill.
We're talking about Bill C-30 today. We're talking about this amendment. Its focus is on small and medium-sized brewers, if I'm not mistaken. I think it's a very important amendment. It's important that we talk about small and medium-sized businesses and excise tax relief for small and medium-sized businesses.
We know that when it comes to small and medium-sized businesses, they can't afford the fancy, high-priced consultants and lobbyists who would circle Ottawa and the offices of MPs, ministers and department officials. Having some sort of relief as well as this assessment of the impact of those sections that we're discussing and of the measures and the impacts that they have is of great importance.
Small and medium-sized businesses are always left behind. There are a lot of small and medium-sized businesses in Richmond Hill and in the greater Toronto area. There are brewers all over the GTA and southern Ontario, and they tell me all of the time that they don't feel heard. I meet with them all of the time.
Some employ maybe five employees. Some employ 50, 100 or 200 employees, but they don't feel heard. They're not part of some fancy industry organization, and they can't produce those reports or get that dataset. Sometimes they rely on the government to provide that information, whether it's through StatsCan...and we know how important the work is that they do in providing Canadians and businesses timely information.
That's something that I think this committee and all parliamentarians.... We're here to represent Canadians. We're not here to represent the interests of the government. For the people who live in our ridings, their communities include those small business owners who are often forgotten. When they see the hundred-million-dollar and multi-billion-dollar cheques that this government writes, it just looks like corporate welfare, time and time again.
The Liberal government likes to say, “Oh, this is a new government.” We're seeing the same sorts of press releases as the last Liberal government put out on corporate welfare and cheques that were written. It seems like the voices of small and medium-sized businesses, including brewers in the GTA and across Ontario, and across the country, for that matter, are not heard.
I think it's very reasonable to have this review so that there's timely, recurring information. I've been in office now for 13 or 14 months. One of the things I feel as a parliamentarian is the frustration that sometimes there's information we don't get, even as business owners. I was a business student before. I was a lawyer before. It's about getting information, but it's not readily made available. Having some of that information from the government would help, especially when small and medium-sized businesses don't have the resources to hire the consultants to do the surveys and influence public opinion. They're relying on the government to provide that kind of information, whether it's through investment or the fiscal impact of these taxes that seem to keep increasing.
We're living in the middle of a cost of living crisis. That doesn't just impact Canadians, families and consumers. It impacts the businesses too. They're facing rising input costs that are not addressed, of course, because of the high Liberal taxes and red tape that seem to always increase. Having some of that information readily available is important to those businesses, which also create jobs.
Sometimes folks who are in the government for too long forget that. The government doesn't create the jobs. Businesses do. People do. Canadians do. Canadians willing to take that risk on entrepreneurship and create that enterprise are the ones who are creating the jobs. We know small and medium-sized businesses employ a vast majority of the workforce. It's not large businesses. It's not government, for that matter.
We've seen the government grow. A lot of times, we see some government MPs brag about job numbers. Actually, the vast majority of growth in a given month could just be seasonal work or part-time jobs. Worse yet, it could be government employment.
Small and medium-sized businesses are the backbone of the economy and we need to make sure we support them. That includes the timely information that we are able to get for those businesses that cannot hire those high-priced consultants or issue those surveys to be able to obtain that. It's a very reasonable, common-sense....
We talk about sovereignty and all that. That's a Liberal government talking point in a press release about Canadian sovereignty, buy Canadian and all that. We don't understand that lots of times large businesses are foreign-owned and most shareholders—