Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My friend is being a little disingenuous in referring to this measure as the status quo. As he knows, this was a proposal by the former government of which he was a member, but this proposal was never passed into law.
Today we are actually dealing with what tax and budget measures will be passed into law. The measure that he is bringing forward in these amendments was a proposal by his government. I certainly applaud him for continuing to support it, and I think it's obviously consistent on his part, but it's not the status quo in the sense that the proposal was never passed into law.
Here we are deciding what tax measures will actually be put into legislation and will become the law of the land. As I said before, our government has put a very coherent and very substantial tax reduction package into place, but it contains measures other than personal income tax rate reductions. By changing those numbers, as this amendment proposes, the whole budgeting process would be thrown completely out of whack.
We certainly wouldn't be supportive of that. I think Canadians would find it very difficult to accept that this committee would somehow put billions of extra tax liability into the budget at this stage of the game.