RMT Clients Are Speaking Up

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

We have been overwhelmed with the thoughtful responses our clients have prepared in response to the Liberal governments attack on entrepreneurs and will be releasing a series of those responses in the coming weeks.  Here is an example of a letter written to our clients MP and the Minister of Finance:

Dear Finance Minister,

I am writing on behalf of myself and my co-founder.

We are now a respected small business with 8 partners, 35 employees and 100’s of clients in Canada and across North America. But when we started in 2001 we financed our business by mortgaging our homes.  It was a big risk but we took it. We worked hard (70+ hour weeks) and in the early years we wouldn’t have survived if our spouses didn’t work. But we persevered and eventually achieved success, growing our business several 1000% and creating employment for over 40 people. And we pay a lot of money each month into EI and CPP and payroll tax – money that wouldn’t be generated if we hadn’t founded our business. We’ve never asked for help. We’ve never looked for government funding or grants. And if we had failed we wouldn’t have had access to EI or support.

We had difficult times in the early days and hit many thresholds where we struggled deciding whether to continue. If the restrictions you’re proposing had existed when we started, we may not have even gone forward. We took risks in search of long-term success. Your proposed legislation discourages risk taking and entrepreneurship. If you strip out the returns that entrepreneurs can realize, fewer of them will be willing to take the risk to start their businesses and will stay in the security and comfort of being an employee. And employees don’t drive growth – entrepreneurs do!

Canada is just beginning to experience an entrepreneurial renaissance. If your intention is to treat entrepreneurs like employees, you’ll suppress the burgeoning economic momentum that is just beginning to take hold in Canada. That willingness to take risk and create jobs should be rewarded so that we have a better future.