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Ontario’s small business owners must wonder what they did to offend anyone.

Most are just as the name indicates: individuals or families with modest-size businesses in which they’ve invested their time and savings in hopes of being their own boss. They run beauty parlours and barber shops, pizza franchises and coffee outlets, variety stores and garages. They take risks and employ people, and, if they’re lucky, produce a moderate livelihood that offers a bit of independence and a lot of long hours. They’re not rich. They’re the backbone of the economy.

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Yet somehow they’ve landed in the crosshairs of some powerful politicians who see them as cash cows for hard-pressed governments in need of more money to feed their spending plans.

Fresh from a bitter, six-month struggle to fend off federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau — a multi-millionaire corporate boss who sought to push up their personal tax bill — Ontario’s small business owners have now been targeted by Premier Kathleen Wynne, who has seized on a controversial minimum wage hike as a means to improve her party’s leaden popularity.