When the Trudeau government came back into power in 1980, we finally had a real player on board at CFIB. That was Jim Bennett, hired the previous year. Jim had worked as a senior policy advisor to Jean Chretien when he held major cabinet posts.
The first thing we did was get a meeting with the New Minister of Finance, Allan MacEachen, who was also the Deputy Prime Minister. Our concern at the time was the growth in Unemployment Insurance premiums. He did not listen, and his October budget jumped UI rates again. The budget also tried to deal with all the implications of the National Energy Program which was dividing the nation.
But we did have a big victory! That was a provision to allow full deductibility of salaries paid to spouses (husbands and wives working together) in unincorporated small businesses. It was a victory after six years of effort and put $75 million back into the hands of small firms.
One of the valuable lessons we learned from Jim Bennett's years in Ottawa is that there is an exclusive club made up of Chiefs of Staff and policy and political advisers to Ministers that all work and play together and all report indirectly to someone in the Prime Minister's Office.
So during one of our full days together meeting politicians, I remember with great joy Jim asking who would you like to meet today because he knew all the chiefs of staff personally and could get them to pull out their Ministers for quick photos. So that day we had three impromptu meetings with Ministers and this photo is one of them. He is Senator Olson and the Leader from the Senate in the federal cabinet and from Alberta.
We never had such access to the federal bureaucracy and the federal politicians as we had during the 1980-81 period when the Liberals were back in power, and Jim Bennett was able to make use of all his old networks.
A fun meeting held in 1981 with the new Minister of State for Small Business, Charles LaPointe from Charlevoix, Quebec brought to Ottawa our Quebec Division Manager, Michel Hamel. We did not have a French-speaking lieutenant from Quebec, so Michel was asked to do double duty. The education of small business ministers was all about keeping them from doing us any harm. In practice, they had no real clout unless we pushed their cause with the Prime Minister's Office.
The extraordinary access we enjoyed during the 1980-81 period with a well-connected Director of National Affairs did not mean that we had a government favourable to small business. Only two years later, we were in a tax fight second only to the great tax battle of 1970. It seems that in the business of advocacy you must be ready to fight regardless of who is in power or who you think is a friend. Political friends are never real friends.