Sure. Let me address that briefly.
There are a couple of issues I have with what I refer to as the boutique tax credits. One is that you're eroding the tax base. The government is giving you credits and costing revenue in that way, which means that the tax base is getting smaller. In order to raise the same amount of revenue, rates must go higher.
The general preference, which I think many of the people in front of the committee have likely expressed, is a system that has low rates but a broad base. So that's where part of the concern comes in.
The other part of the concern ties in with the other part of your question. With these kinds of tax credits, the difference between that and more general consumption taxation is that you're picking and choosing which types of expenditure are eligible for these tax credits, whereas with the general consumption tax, it's neutral across different types of expenditure.
As an example, for the fitness tax credit, I remember reading last year a presentation by the representative from the Federation of Canadian Archers, who was worried that archery wasn't going to be considered to be enough of a physical activity to qualify for the fitness tax credit.
So you have meetings and lots of interest about how you define where you're going to draw the line and what's enough fitness. My point is that you're picking and choosing what's good for kids and what's not. I'm not sure if archery is good or bad for kids, but I'm pretty sure that having a system that treats archery the same as the chess club the same as hockey is actually a pretty good system.