That is right; it is a tax trick. Madam Speaker, even my opposition colleagues know that it is simply a temporary tax trick.
I suppose maybe the Liberals think that their hand is in people's pockets already, so they might as well just grab a little extra cash. What they have failed to realize, and it has been brought up by members of the opposition, is the havoc that it is going to wreak on small business owners. Again, I have received calls, and I assume all members from wherever they may be have as well, asking, “Do you know how a point-of-sale system works? Do you know how hard it is to get an overnight December 13 group of staff to come in and make all these changes? What if we collectively screw something up a little bit? Is CRA going to come and audit me right away?”
Small-business owners like the idea of actual tax reductions, permanent ones; those would help drive prosperity, but the tax trick is simply not appealing and is driving a whole bunch of extra work. We have all heard the same thing: People are going to return things now and then rebuy them at the busiest time of the year. These are legitimate grievances from our small-business community, which is the backbone of our economy.
I do not want say that business owners were ignored, because of course under the Liberal government they were probably just never listened to. Consulting is not something the Liberal government takes a lot of pride in. It announces something and everybody is upset at it, and then it decides to forge ahead. It does not matter if it is a terrible idea.
I think some of these examples illustrate what we have seen with the matter at hand, the Liberal green slush fund scandal. In my previous interventions in this place, I have detailed the history of the scandal, but I will provide a little bit of context for Canadians who are perhaps listening in for the first time and wondering why we are still debating the privilege motion and why the government will not just hand over the documents. Those are reasonable questions for Canadians to ask—