Even before he became Prime Minister, the signs were there that Justin Trudeau was instinctively anti-small-business and that this would inform his approach to taxation and regulation of the private sector:
Changes to capital gains tax in this year’s budget were aimed at the wealthy, said the Trudeau Liberals, but the move has angered small businesses owners who have been snared by the increase.
Maybe that was part of the plan, since Justin Trudeau appears to view small business owners as rich Canadians trying to dodge taxes.
In an illuminating interview with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge in 2015, Trudeau didn’t directly answer a question about whether he would lower taxes for small businesses.
But he did say, “We have to know that a large percentage of small businesses are actually just ways for wealthier Canadians to save on their taxes and we want to reward the people that are actually creating jobs and contributing in concrete ways.”
It was a remarkable denigration of small business owners and may have passed unnoticed because Trudeau was still a month away from becoming prime minister.
For the record, businesses with fewer than 100 people employ almost 12 million private workers in this country.
And the government’s own statistics state that in the 20 years up to 2020, the number of small businesses increased every year except for three — 2013, 2016 and 2020 — so a decrease in two of the Trudeau years.
Meanwhile, Trudeau’s apparently tax-dodging wealthy small businesses seem to be having a hard time of it. Businesses that began with four or less employees were only 62 per cent likely to still be operating five years later.
Earlier this year, Reuters news agency warned that a 38 per cent spike in bankruptcies of small businesses in the first 11 months of 2023 could rise even further.
Small businesses are “an integral engine of Canada’s economy,” said the budget, but 72 per cent of the owners fear that the new changes to capital gains tax will harm the climate for investment and growth.
Interestingly, when Trudeau was asked in that 2015 interview how he planned to balance the budget by 2019, because that was what he promised, it was investment and growth that was the answer.
Then prime minister Stephen Harper had tried to cut his way out of the deficit, said Trudeau. “That doesn’t work.”
“He has been unable to create growth. He has the worst record on growth of any prime minister in 80 years.”
But as the Fraser Institute has pointed out, in the last nine years under Trudeau, Canadian living standards have declined.
