I'm glad to see that you were a proud member of CFIB.
Indeed, lowering the tax burden is always one of the highest priorities of our members, and I would say there are numerous ways of doing it. Whether it's on payroll taxes or on tax credits or on EI, there are numerous ways of putting some money back in the pockets of small business owners. In the last budget there was some very good news from a tax point of view, such as the $400,000 threshold for small businesses.
In a way, what we're saying is that you need to be able to give a bit of a break to the small business owners from a tax point of view in order to help them reinvest this money into their businesses. This is contrary to big businesses--and I don't want to attack big businesses--but of course big businesses answer to shareholders. Normally big businesses can be there to make profits, obviously, and of course they want to put dividends in the pockets of their shareholders.
It's very different in the independent business. If you give a tax break to a small business owner, what is he going to do with it? He's not necessarily going to put it in his pocket. He's going to put it back in his business. He's going to create more jobs. He's going to create more opportunities for training. He's going to create more opportunities for investing in technology in order to improve his business performance. This is basically what we're talking about.
As for your second question, I guess it was on a different way of cutting taxes. As I said, in the last budget there was some very good news and we were encouraged. I'm going to give you an example. The taxe sur la capitale, the capital tax, is against logic. You tax the profit before the business has even made one cent. It doesn't make sense. Everybody says it's against logic. I think the governments have to attack that sort of bad taxing that basically is counterproductive to businesses.