Thank you. That's a good point; and yes, we acknowledge that.
Some of you were at this committee when we were asked to come to an emergency committee in 2005 on the fuel crisis. It was going up to a dollar a litre. We were all asked to come in, because people were asking what we were going to do. We did some surveying and found that 20% of our members said that they were going to have a difficult time hanging on. Agriculture, trucking, forestry—by the way, we have 13,000 manufacturing members—were all having difficulty at a dollar a litre. Now, no one is talking about it.
And yes, two cents was taken off. But it is, on average, $1.30. In some places it's $1.39. In Quebec it's quite high. We'll have to weather this storm. There's no question. This is a lesson for all policies, whether we go back to EI, whether we go back into a tax, or whether we go into tax credits. Let's not exacerbate the problem; let's try to find ways to alleviate that problem.
So yes, I acknowledge it, but I will say that we have a major issue here. It reminds me of the time we tried to talk to the Conservative Party about the GST and how it was going to be a problem bringing in the GST during a recession. Well, I feel that same sense right now, the same circumstances, about additional taxes on gas right now.