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Results: 1 - 15 of 814
View Tamara Jansen Profile
CPC (BC)
First, Mr. Easter, over this time that we've been working together, I have detected a farmer's heart in you, and I'm very thankful for that. When you were going to make an announcement, I thought that maybe you were going to cross the floor and come to the good side.
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mrs. Tamara Jansen: It has been a pleasure to work with you. Thank you very much.
Now I'll go back to the matter at hand. Mr. St-Jean, we are here to evaluate the CRA's progress in regard to tackling tax evasion. I want to go back to 2015, when Prime Minister Trudeau said that the wealthiest Canadians were using small business tax rates to reduce their tax bills. He was basically calling small business owners tax cheats.
At the time, I was one of those people out there delivering flowers to customers in the heat of the summer, sweating it away in the old Hino truck with no air conditioning, which was, according to him, nothing more than a clever tax haven. I have to say that I was really insulted, as I believe many other small business owners were.
Now here we are in 2021, and the Liberals have thrown billions of dollars at the CRA to expose these supposed small business tax cheats. I know that the CFIB said at the time that his assumptions were seriously flawed, and so far there appears to be no evidence whatsoever that he was right. Does it make any sense for the Liberals to have developed this tax policy and hired so many new staff based on those assumptions, especially when we see that the CRA makes deals with the big tax cheats but keeps going after the little guy?
Charles-Antoine St-Jean
View Charles-Antoine St-Jean Profile
Charles-Antoine St-Jean
2021-06-15 17:00
Thank you very much for that question.
I think we saw that the last budget was talking about investing a lot more money in tracking the tax data, getting better systems and getting more legal firepower to the CRA to help combat tax evasion. This is the way we read the announcement from the government, which we support, but I will let my colleague Bruce Ball comment especially on the small business tax.
Bruce Ball
View Bruce Ball Profile
Bruce Ball
2021-06-15 17:01
Maybe I'll start with the first part of the question. I do know that a lot of businesses took exception, I guess, to the suggestion that they were somehow doing something wrong, and I'd agree that the majority aren't.
The issue is the underground economy. There are still business people and other people doing activities in the underground economy. Over the years we're working with CRA in trying to find ways to have these individuals or these companies come forward. Typically they're individuals, because corporations can be tracked, and there will be more of that with the registry, but it's to have these individuals come forward. We've been talking to them about education and taking advantage of the voluntary disclosure program and that kind of thing.
In addition to the money for verification, I think it's also important for the government to continue to try to get people out of the underground economy and to come forward and become compliant taxpayers.
View Tamara Jansen Profile
CPC (BC)
I couldn't agree with you more. I know that we've been very thankful to have accountants who were honest and wanted to help us make sure we could sleep at night because we did the right thing.
Last week at the finance committee, I asked the CRA's Ted Gallivan why they were continuing to target small business owners with audits during a pandemic, and he proudly told me they had initiated a six-month pause on those audits. Considering that this pandemic has been going on for more than 15 months, would you say that aggressive audits are just another way of going after the easy target rather than the big tax cheats?
Bruce Ball
View Bruce Ball Profile
Bruce Ball
2021-06-15 17:04
I was listening to the conversation last week. I'm not sure that they were auditing small businesses generally.
What Mr. Gallivan said agreed with what I thought. They were doing reviews of the assistance programs, so maybe that was part of it. They were reviewing the wage subsidy applications and later the rental applications. I'm not quite sure what the audit activity would be if it wasn't around some of the support programs.
View Tamara Jansen Profile
CPC (BC)
Yes. Thank you.
You were just mentioning that we have grown by 15%, but we haven't seen any actual increases, which is disappointing.
Debi Daviau, President of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, suggested at the finance committee that CRA's focus should be on wealthy individuals and powerful corporations who do the majority of the cheating.
I had asked her why CRA appears to be aggressively focusing on small mom-and-pop shops for audits during COVID and ignoring the wealthy individuals. She identified this actually as a real problem. Her response was the following:
I just don't think the Canada Revenue Agency is up—
View Tamara Jansen Profile
CPC (BC)
I'm going to quote her:
...I just don't think that they have the same capacity to address international taxes that they do to address local taxes. ....certainly employees at the Canada Revenue Agency are up against, as I said, tax giants. These are people who have immense skill, technology, expertise and other big companies on their side.
It's interesting to hear how your testimony today asserts the complete opposite on how well CRA is doing on chasing down wealthy overseas tax cheats.
With the number of dollars that CRA has invested over the last years, why didn't you invest in the tools you need to go after the big guys rather than focus on those little mom-and-pop shops, especially during a pandemic?
Ted Gallivan
View Ted Gallivan Profile
Ted Gallivan
2021-06-10 16:48
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let's start with one of the premises, which was COVID. During COVID, my colleague Alex MacLean, who looks after international tax and large business, never stopped. They never downtooled those audits. We continued to focus on those taxpayers while giving six months of a kind of hiatus on contact for small businesses.
The CRA did suspend its small and medium-sized enterprise audits for a full six months, and when we resumed, we did so on a more consultative basis, checking in with businesses to see if we could start.
It would be my testimony today that during COVID the situation has actually been the the opposite of the testimony you would have received. The CRA never stopped its work on high-net-worth individuals and big companies through COVID. We made a deliberate pause because we understood that small businesses were suffering during COVID. When we resumed, we tried to make it a more consultative process based on the readiness of that business to withstand an audit.
Alexandra MacLean
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Alexandra MacLean
2021-06-10 16:49
Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
I just wanted to add how seriously we take our mandate in international and large business directorate. We have been staffing up and we have been focusing on training. As the member indicated, we are challenging very well resourced interests that have very well qualified advisors. They have very deep pockets. There is a strong focus on improving training and making sure our people are well equipped to take on the most challenging and complex tax situations.
We have also invested a lot in information technology. I think Mr. Gallivan has touched on that in some of his answers. The amount of data coming into the agency is better than it has been in the past by quite a lot. We're better able to detect relationships and transactions than we were in the past, for sure.
However, it is a challenging business. There's a lot of money at stake, as many people have mentioned during this afternoon's proceedings. A lot of resources are deployed, I guess, on both sides, but particularly in the interest of high-net-worth individuals and multinational enterprises.
I wonder if my colleagues from Finance want to highlight.... We are quite excited about some of the budget 2021 initiatives that will help us deal with base erosion.
View Annie Koutrakis Profile
Lib. (QC)
View Annie Koutrakis Profile
2021-05-25 16:44
My next question is to Ms. Morano.
With regard to the small business and entrepreneurship development program, your organization noted that Startup Canada is the only national organization capable of delivering on every objective.
Can you expand on this comment and share your thoughts on how Startup Canada can support the work and objectives of the program?
Natasha Hope Morano
View Natasha Hope Morano Profile
Natasha Hope Morano
2021-05-25 16:45
Absolutely. Thank you very much for the question.
Before I answer the question, I would like to make a quick correction. I think I missed an important word in my presentation. When I was mentioning the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and the estimated businesses that are at risk of closing, I may have said 239, and it's 239,000. Thank you for letting me correct that. It changes the dynamic quite drastically.
To answer your question, Startup Canada is a national convenor organization. We are not a competitor. We work with accelerators. We work with incubators. We work with other support organizations in the ecosystem. We constantly receive feedback from entrepreneurs from coast to coast to coast regarding where their biggest pain points are.
Something that we hold very dear to our hearts is that we provide entrepreneurs with a solid foundation to ensure they're equipped and ready to start businesses. This, to me, is an important aspect of what the government is trying to communicate in recognizing the importance of entrepreneurs playing a critical role in job creation and job growth. We create the entrepreneurs who are going to be creating the companies for tomorrow, as well as job creation.
Because we work with every single entrepreneur regardless of where they are in their entrepreneurship journey, we have programs that are created in response to their needs.
When I say that we're the only national organization that's capable of supporting.... We are already doing all of this. We're looking to the government. We're coming to the government, saying, “Look we're a trusted voice. Entrepreneurs come to us. They trust us. They know that we're able to support them regardless of where they are in their journey.”
We would love to be able to partner formally with the government to amplify our impact and deliver on being able to provide the end-users, that being entrepreneurs, with the tools, resources and services that the government seems to be very keen on wanting to do to support job creation and job growth.
View Pat Kelly Profile
CPC (AB)
Monsieur Côté, we heard testimony at the finance committee about indebtedness within the small business community.
Not all of your members are small businesses but many of them are. Do you want to comment on the level of indebtedness, and how, for small businesses, the debt that they've had to take on to get through this pandemic may threaten recovery?
Can you talk about debt?
Jean-Guy Côté
View Jean-Guy Côté Profile
Jean-Guy Côté
2021-05-21 13:51
I don't have specific numbers on the indebtedness of the small and medium-sized businesses that I have in the association, but what I know is that some of them are in pretty bad shape right now. It's going to impair their capacity to rebound after the pandemic, and some are on hold because of this. Since the interest rates are not fixed for the next few months, there are some concerns about what's going on and what's going to happen.
View Annie Koutrakis Profile
Lib. (QC)
View Annie Koutrakis Profile
2021-05-21 13:52
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My thanks to all the witnesses for their presentations and their comments this afternoon.
Mr. Côté, I would first like to go back to Mr. Kelly's question. As we know, one of the funding programs for small businesses in Canada helps to obtain loans from financial institutions. I am sure that some of your members can use that program.
First, how does that program help the retailers you represent?
Second, in your opinion, how will the improved program be better for the retailers?
Jean-Guy Côté
View Jean-Guy Côté Profile
Jean-Guy Côté
2021-05-21 13:52
Thank you for your question.
I have no specific data on the reaction of retailers to that program in particular. However, I can tell you that access to capital often depends on the field of expertise of the retailers or the industry of which they are part. Some retailers in some sectors have better chances to obtain funding. We have also observed funding trends at retail level. Currently, there is a lot of electronic commerce, so it is a little easier to obtain funding for e-commerce than it was before.
Although we have seen an increase in online purchases during the pandemic, we still foresee a return to brick-and-mortar businesses after the pandemic. So we must make sure that the retailers who have adopted an omnichannel strategy—meaning those that can provide both online and in-person services—have access to appropriate funding. That could be a helpful change to the program for small and medium-size businesses.
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