Let me add a number of comments.
First of all, to me, putting a lot of weight on what's consumption versus income taxes could be a bit of an exercise, because under the income tax today, there are elements of what you would call “consumption taxation”. That's because we have brought in provisions that allow people to avoid paying tax on their savings income, or effectively, in the case of the RRSPs and pensions plans, you're able to deduct your contributions from the income base. In other words, you deduct your savings, so you're only paying tax on your consumption at that point. Then, when you withdraw your money from the RRSP account or receive your pension, you're being taxed on your consumption.
With the introduction of the tax-free savings account, that's another way, actually, of doing consumption taxation. Of course, our tax treatment of housing in Canada is very much based on a consumption system. You don't get a deduction for the contributions, but you don't pay any tax on the imputed rental income you get by owning the house and renting it to yourself, or capital gains taxes on the ownership of that house. Therefore, all these elements, once you take them into account, are equivalent to an RRSP-type system, as long as you have similar tax rates over time when doing the treatment of this type of asset.
As a result, many Canadians actually are on what's called a “consumption-based system” under the income tax, because all their assets are being held in either owner-occupied housing or in RRSP pension accounts, and they now have available to them the tax-free savings account. Effectively, to the extent that everything is in those kinds of assets and they do not pay any tax on their return on savings, they are really being treated as one would have as a consumption tax under the personal income tax.
There are other ways that I think you can bring in consumption taxes and increase the weight. Clearly, one of them is to encourage provincial sales tax reform, to eliminate the retail sales taxes in favour of value-added taxes. Currently, retail sales taxes collect about one third of the revenues on businesses' intermediate and capital good inputs, and that actually has an impact on their competitiveness.
If we move to a value-added tax, which has now been adopted in more than 150 countries around the world today, and of course we have it at the federal level with the GST, and we have the Quebec sales tax in Quebec and the harmonized sales tax in—