For Trudeau, it’s all about helping his friends

It’s amazing the difference in how Justin Trudeau and his Liberals treat different groups depending on how they see you. Are you a friend or an easy target?

If you are a friend of the Trudeau Liberals, the world is your oyster and the public purse is yours for the looting. If you are perceived as an easy target, look out.

Right now the perceived easy target is Canada’s small business community.

Sold as targeting rich doctors and lawyers, Trudeau’s finance minister Bill Morneau dropped the most significant changes to Canada’s small business tax policy in 50 years in the middle of summer and announced there would be 75 days of online consultation before implementation starting in October.

The Liberals and the federal public service have literally been on a public relations campaign, with heavy use of social media to claim this is about fairness, about making the wealthy pay their fair share and about stopping tax cheats.

But this isn’t about going after rich doctors who pay their spouse or kids to do nothing all in an attempt to lower their income tax.

Simply put these changes will impact every small business from coast to coast. The dry cleaner down the street. A target. The local barber shop. A target. The neighbourhood mechanic. A target.

It looked last week that the Liberals might be getting ready to back down as Liberal MPs reported back to their party bosses about the angry phone calls and emails, but then on Friday, Trudeau doubled down saying again this was about fairness and making the rich pay more.

Trudeau said he would “make no apologies” for his policy.

“We’re doing more for the people who need it and doing less for the people who don’t,” Trudeau said.

He also said the he wants to make the wealthy pay “a little bit more.”

Here’s the reality, as told to me by Perrin Beatty, President and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, two-thirds of Canadian small business owners make less than $73,000 a year. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business says the average annual earnings for a small business owner runs at about $60,000.

That’s not near the one percent.

If Justin Trudeau and his office want to look at getting at the wealthy, they should look at their friends, the ones they reward handsomely.

It was just two weeks ago that we found out that Rana Sarkar, a twice failed Liberal candidate and personal friend of Justin Trudeau and the PM’s right hand man Gerald Butts was being paid nearly double the posted salary for taking the job of Consul General in San Francisco.

Butts defended the move to pay his buddy somewhere between $221,300 and $260,300 for a job that was posted as paying between $119,600 and $140,700. (The feds only release salary information in bands, not specific numbers.)

Sarkar is a friend and left a Bay Street job to work in the federal civil service was the response from Butts.

Never mind that Sarkar has twice tried to be elected as a Liberal MP, which would have seen his salary be a paltry $172,000, Sarkar is a friend and therefore deserves special treatment. And a salary that sits at least 4.5 times what the average Canadian working full time earns.

Of course, Sarkar got the job because Gerry Butts wanted him to have it, another privileged Liberal at the trough who makes a similar salary and billed taxpayers $127,000 to move from Toronto to Ottawa so he could take the high paying job he now has.

Trudeau has been waging class warfare trying to pit regular Canadians against the wealthy, the one percent, since long before the last election. It helped him win the last election in some ways and so he is keeping it up.

It is truly bizarre that Justin Trudeau, born into a family that hasn’t had to work since his grandfather Charles-Emile struck it rich with oil and other business ventures in the 1930, is teaming up with Bill Morneau, a man who had his company handed to him by his father to tell small business owners about fairness and how they should run their affairs.

Small business owners are the middle class that Trudeau says he is trying to help, he and his friends are the one percent he likes to rail against.

  • Brian. Great article, except you forgot that this will also affect farmers the same. The very people that feed us all. Thank You.

  • The arrogance of Trudeau and Morneau is astounding. Neither has ever had to create a small business or worry about payroll and rent yet they are going after every small business for more taxes. Business owners will suddenly find themselves having to cut back on their budgets and at the same time interest rates are increasing. Creating the perfect storm for a mass number of business closings. Next landlords will be sitting on vacant property and will also face the triple storm of increased taxes higher interest rates and less demand for space. Trudeau will bankrupt Canada and then walk away with a huge pension, family money and a smug legacy of social agenda accomplishments that he will crow about for the rest of his life.

    • Just look back to the National Energy Policy that Pierre Trudeau implemented in 1981 that almost destroyed Alberta, and recovery was a painful recovery over two decades. The son is going down the same slippery slope that will decimate the Canadian Economy. Being a business owner in the 1980, was painful in letting staff go, being called into the bank every week to review your receivables. Calgary Foothills Industrial Park was nothing but a mass of signs for buildings to be leased. No Prime Minister can be this uneducated to Economics 101, but then there is a first time for everything. His smug Royalty attitude and dislike for Canadians West of Quebec is no longer being concealed. The $241 million dollars given to the Clinton Foundation, should gain him some hidden wealth for down the road. How sad is it when so many people think he is doing a good job, without looking at where the Liberals are taking us. Cannot wait until 2019 hopefully Canadians will wake up to vote him and the liberal out of power.

  • The people who voted in that corrupt thief should be held accountable and THEY should pay for the liberties the Crime Minister is taking with OUR money!

  • I guess the PM and Butts have no idea how hard small Busness men work for sure, or Dr’s for that matter. Many Surgeon’s are on their feet the whole day, many times without breaks, Mr Trudeau certainly couldn’t work that long, nor Mr Butts!

  • I wonder where Justin got the idea that small business is just rich people trying to hide from paying their fair share… overpriced speaking engagements to charities perhaps? Now I’m starting to understand why he thinks Canadians have no values!

  • Fantastic column! We have two trust fund kids (Trudeau and Morneau) calling the small business community, a group they originally said they were here to help, a bunch of tax cheats while ordering them hand over the loot. The Liberals SO DEPEND on the votes of the uninformed.

  • He hates the fact that Canada is doing so well. His whole agenda is to weeken our strong position in the world. Thanks George for our gift!

  • It’s amazing how gullible some people are. I’ve had a couple of people suggest to me that maybe I DID have it too easy. I don’t think employees, who haven’t tried to operate a business, have any idea of the amount of work involved.

    I’ve been creating a collection of links to articles about these tax changes in a forum on our website. If you write any that are only about the tax proposals, I’d be happy to add a blurb and a link back to your site. You can see the collection here.

    https://purifyofficecleaningedmonton.com/community/main-forum/new-tax-reforms-are-not-on-the-wealthy/

  • This is wrong wrong . Trudeau thinks we’re stupid and buy into this. He is so out of touch. He is fooling himself. He needs to get his head on straight

  • I am a physician and my wife is too. She is working reduced hours right now because we have a young family. The previous plan was for her to return soon to working full-time hours and to start her own family practice to serve our rural community. We talked this morning – why work full-time when 53% of it will go to the government? She will still keep a hand in it because she enjoys it… but setting up an office? payroll? constant disparagement from the provincial and federal governments that we are overpaid and undertaxed? No thanks! We already do well enough without her income and she can spend more time persuing her own interests. Family doctors are an excellent bargain by the way. If you think marginal decisions like this are not going to add up when taken across the country, you are sadly mistaken Mr. Morneau.

  • That’s a very good target to the small business. I really hope I were never open my shop. As a small business owner, I believe at least 99% of other small business owners are as same as me. We working more then 16 hours everyday. I mean every single day. What we have at the end? $5 per hour, even maybe less, if you really want to count hour by hour. Do nothing t forget that we cannot have EI, we can’t have CPP, and we have no vocation pays, we have no pension, also have no any benefits either my self or my family members. My friends working for governments, great, are paid over 60k per year, even some of them are paid over 100k per year, what they have?? What they need to do?? Are they over paid? Everyone knows what they are doing and how they working for their jobs. In the morning, not weak up yet, sure have coffee break 3 or 5 times, then o ya, time to lunch. The lunch brake will have somewhere between 1.5 hour to 3 hours that what I ever heard. Then what? Back to the desk around 1:30pm to 2pm, another tea break, then time to home. Are they over paid? 10 thousand percent a “yes” they over paid. Also the “call sick”, so great for them. No matter what, a call and said sick, they can stay home and saving money for cold care, even some of them just work from home and get paid over 100k per year. I do really want to have all the dame benefits, vocation pay, EI, and Penson they had and also pay myself over 60k.
    Most of small business owners are working very hard and really not making a lot of money, how about you Justin, comes down to my shop and run for a year, then you can understand how hard we are and how much we do really make per hour. The most important is we have to take the risk for the business go success or loss. And government workers never worry about lost their easy job or been lay off. Thank you for people reading my post. English is not my first language, so hope you guys can understand.