Mr. Speaker, constituents in my riding of Calgary Heritage are expressing genuine concern about the cash grab the government is making at the expense of small-business owners. These measures penalize entrepreneurship and wrongly depict law-abiding small-business owners, who have built their business models around long-established rules, as somehow now cheating the system. In addition to insulting hard-working Canadians, the government is also threatening growth by disrupting a sector of the economy that accounts for much of the country's private labour force.
It is not too late for the government to backtrack from these harmful measures and to step away from a proposal that will prove punishing for many middle-class taxpayers. Will the government do right by business owners, or will it continue on this punitive path?