First of all, I think you're right that it can be revenue neutral. In fact, there's going to be a paper coming out on Ontario value-added taxation, which I've done with a couple of colleagues at the University of Toronto, where we've gone into this in detail.
First of all, let me say that if Ontario converted its retail sales tax into a value-added tax, whether fully harmonized with the GST, or maybe with some deviations from the GST, like the Quebec sales tax, it could levy the tax rate at about 8% without losing revenue—but it wouldn't gain any revenue either.
There is one virtue, though, which is what we found out. Retail sales taxes in Ontario have only grown 3% per year in nominal terms—not when inflation is taken out—over the past five or six years, while value-added tax collections in Ontario of the federal GST have actually been more buoyant with the economy and have actually increased 5% per year. In a sense, Ontario is hurting itself by maintaining a retail sales tax that actually is not growing very well with the economy, and that's because of the way it operates.
Now, there are some things that Ontario—