Mr. Speaker, if someone launches a start-up in Canada, their competitors may be south of the border, where they get paid in U.S. dollars, have more access to risk capital, and pay lower marginal income tax rates. How can someone compensate and sign up the best and brightest here at home when there is little money to spare? The answer is often stock options, where workers accept lower pay in exchange for a piece of future gains. Doubling taxes on stock options may smother businesses right out of existence, when in fact we should do the opposite.
The goal of social justice should not be to turn workers against business owners but to turn workers into business owners, as Thatcher put it, to free all people, to lift themselves up through work, risk, and smarts. That is the Canadian way.