Good evening. It's nice to see you all.
Like Mr. Doherty, I'm new to this committee and new to this file, so I did not benefit from participating in the decades of experience that you bring to this.
I was doing some math on this, and I'll tell you, in my by-election campaign during this summer, this was a major issue, especially for the smaller side of the small and medium-sized businesses that you're describing. This would crush them. The anxiety they feel about these taxes that are coming their way as well as the heavy-handedness generally of health policy-makers over the last four to five years.... It has created massive anxieties. I think they would benefit from more empathy when considering how to engage them and to ensure the safety of Canadians in the products they consume.
Health freedom is important, but so, too, is safety.
I was just looking at this, and maybe you can help explain this to me. There are 200,000 products. At $542 tax for each product, that amounts to over $108 million of annual tax revenue for the cost recovery piece of a 53-part program from 20 years ago. An annualized $108 million seems like an excessive approach toward cost recovery, when I can think of the Asian infrastructure bank as one immediate means to accomplish cost recovery for these types of services, which I'm sure cost a lot less than $108 million a year.
Could you explain to me the math around how this is the cost recovery that the Treasury Board's strict guidelines produced, Dr. Lourenco?