Madam Speaker, one of the ironies about the party that I sit with is that I have three small businesses. I do not have much to do with them these days because I am pretty busy here and in my riding, and my managers take care of them
But in the small business community there is lots of competition. Adam Smith's rules of supply and demand work relatively well in the small business community. Having read The Wealth of Nations not once but twice, I would urge the Conservative Party members to read it. There are a couple of big caveats in Adam Smith's invisible hand.
Adam Smith pointed out that the only time his theories of the invisible hand work is when we have lots of small and medium-size buyers and sellers, so that no one distributor or producer can control supply or demand or price. That is the real theory of Adam Smith. That is the real theory of capitalism.
Ironically, on top of that, 87% of all the jobs created in Canada over the last several decades have been by small business people across Canada.
Therefore, the myth that our future, our economics, lies with big business is just that, a myth, particularly when and if there is little or no competition in those marketplaces.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States and a few other leaders across North America in the last century understood this and acted effectively to control trust, to control predatory non-competition. It is time we had it again.