Health care is a good example. There are some excellent examples of the intelligent use of these taxation dollars but nonetheless they are confiscated from businesses and from individuals. We believe, and I state again, a dollar in the hands of the taxpayer is more productive than in the hands of the government.
I would like to take the member up on his comment once again about family trusts. There is somehow a myth which he and his colleagues have bought into that there are countless billions of dollars there. I use that $42 million per family trust figure as an example. When they ask for quantification to say how many dollars are in family trusts, and then turn around and say because Revenue Canada, because the Department of Finance will not give us these numbers that somehow they are trying to hide these numbers from us, the process truly is not open.
The only way that we could quantify how many dollars are in family trusts is if we in this Chamber made the determination that we were going to tax wealth. We tax income, not wealth. To accurately identify how many dollars are in family trusts, because family trusts are a part of the entire relationship between people and companies, we would have to quantify how many dollars perhaps the Speaker is worth, perhaps that I am worth, perhaps that the member is worth. Then we would be able to determine on the basis of this wealth that maybe we will tax you 1 per cent of your wealth over $100,000, whatever the number is.
It is a completely erroneous position to take in my judgment that the finance department and the revenue department are somehow surreptitiously or overtly withholding information. The information does not exist, so how can they give it to the committee?
The member said that some of my comments were an attack on the BQ. I guess that is part of my problem because I find some of the comments to be somewhat nonsensical.