All around them, global economies are collapsing in a world gone mad with rampant greed and corruption, while leaders fight back with socialism for Bay Street—leaving Main Street to deal with brutal capitalism. Yet, these brave entrepreneurs with no safety nets to fall back on, no billion-dollar bailouts, and precious little funding as a global credit crunch rages on still strive to survive. What’s more: they’re determined to lead us out of this mess.

“We want to be the first to show an actual rebound in business sentiment and performance,” says Ted Mallett of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), a powerful lobby with its 105,000 small-to-medium-sized business members. Mallett is CFIB’s chief economist and he dismisses all the doom-and-gloom comparisons to the Dirty Thirties and doomsayer warnings that we’re into a Great Depression era of despair and decay. But he also doesn’t buy into Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney’s rose-coloured predictions that Canada’s recession-ravaged economy will improve to post 2.3% GDP (gross domestic product) growth by the second half of this year and 2.8% in 2009.

“I don’t believe we’ve seen the bottom yet,” warns Mallett.

Bottom line is Canada’s economy is deeply tied to the United States, once the world’s economic superpower, now crumbling under the weight of record debt as it madly prints money for bailouts worth trillions—all because greed and fraud in its capital markets led to the subprime crisis and the collapse of big Wall Street players.

The world energy price, also manifested by greed, nailed the coffin shut on the U.S. and global economies. A year earlier, no world leader would dare utter the “R” word, while here in Canada, we were told “don’t worry, be happy.” Canada was on good footing to weather the storm.

But just as I predicted in a February 2008 Toronto Sun column, entitled “Economic Armageddon”, leaders would soon be fearing the “GD” word: Global Depression.

Suddenly, Ottawa took the States’ lead and started pumping $200 billion of our tax dollars into Canada’s banking system to free up capital. Then, $125 billion in insured mortgage debt was wiped from the books of our Big Banks.

But Canada was already heading in. With a commodities boom now gone bust, Western provinces joined Ontario’s manufacturing heartland in bleeding jobs with 213,000 full-time positions lost since October 2008, and 129,000 in January alone, bringing the unemployment rate up to 7.2%.

By December, bankruptcies skyrocketed by 46.7%, as families could no longer cope with record household debt now at $1.3 trillion. In total, 117,367 consumers and businesses declared bankruptcy in 2008, while foreclosures started stacking up as our hot real estate market took a hit, too. No wonder CFIB’s business barometer index—which tracks its members’ optimism on a quarterly basis—fell to a near record low of 86.1 in December. Its latest survey will be released later this month. The record low was 85.2 back in August 1992, when we were in the midst of the Nasty Nineties’ recession.

“We’ve been here before, and just as in the 1990s recession, it will be small businesses, our country’s largest job creators, who will lead us out,” Mallett confidently predicts.

Catherine Swift, CFIB’s CEO, warns, though, that if Ottawa wants a full recovery, there better be fairer play for these gutsy entrepreneurs, burdened by high taxes, administrative nightmares, gouging bank fees and the high cost of credit.

The CFIB lobbied for, and won, tax relief with Stephen Harper’s minority Conservatives dishing out $20 billion in personal income tax cuts over the next five years. But, when the dust settles, it amounts to only $50 a year in relief for low-income earners, and anywhere from $250 to $500 for middle-income earners, as basic exemption thresholds were lifted.

“The more money in the pockets of Canadians and more spending on Main Street is good for the whole economy,” said Swift.

Harper’s budget also increased the small business threshold from $400,000 to $500,000, froze Employment Insurance (EI) premiums, extended a manufacturing and processing equipment accelerated deduction and boosted small business financing. Other incentives included new home renovation tax credit, while sweetening Ottawa’s Home Buyers Plan by upping the limit that can be borrowed from an RRSP from $20,000 to $25,000.

The budget also earmarked $4 billion for a new two-year infrastructure stimulus fund and $1 billion for the green infrastructure fund.

Swift not only worries about Ottawa’s soaring deficits, which will mean future tax hikes down the road, but she fears the relief money won’t make its way to Main Street fast enough, just as infusions of our tax dollars into the financial system hasn’t eased a credit crunch, even as banks continue to report sweet profits.

But here’s what really hurts. While the Bank of Canada tries to put the brakes on this meltdown by cutting its key rate to 1%, banks are hiking rates on lines of credit and credit cards, while even introducing new fees, like inactivity fees.

At the same time, Visa and MasterCard hiked its transaction fees charged to businesses for credit card transactions, and now these big players also want into the lucrative debit card business. And by October 2010, businesses that don’t buy new machines to handle new cards with chips, will be on the hook for any fraudulent activity.

“Once again, it’s small businesses who pay,” said Swift, who’s demanding a new probe by the Senate banking committee.

My comment is if we keep hurting our gutsy entrepreneurs, we will end up in a Depression. Let’s be fair to my heroes.