It is not, but I do not sense across the way any desire to deal with loopholes in the corporate tax system. They are not even willing to examine the corporate tax system. Every time the Official Opposition suggested such an examination, even during the election campaign, it never got an answer. We tried again recently in the finance committee, but we did not get any answer. In that regard, the Liberal government members sitting on the finance committee can rely on the complicity of the Reform members because they do not want the corporate taxation to be examined either. It is serious when you think that some people even refuse to look at the corporate taxation. We are not suggesting any cuts, but simply to look at the problem in order to perhaps confirm what has been rumoured for several years and confirm also some warnings put forward by the General Auditor of Canada as well as some analyses made by tax experts. We are now completely fed up with this situation.
It is obvious, and I stress, obvious, that we have to find ways to improve the management of public finance and we were the first to realize that the problem is very serious. While the Minister of Finance spoke only in terms of problems with public finance, we used a much stronger term. We spoke of a crisis. Indeed we recognized even more than the finance minister himself that if things keep going on as they are now, the situation will become impossible.
However, what has the Liberal government been doing for a year now to help remedy this situation? In relation to what we and others suggested the government should do to stabilize public finance, what else did it do but take on unemployed workers and welfare recipients, senior citizens and now students with the reform proposals put forward by the Minister of Human Resources Development, and middle income families with all the trial balloons sent up left and right by the Minister of Finance, his officials or his Secretary of State? What else did it do but take on poor families? Every week, I meet some of them in my riding. Families are getting poorer and poorer.
In fact, in this International Year of the Family, families are getting poorer and more desperate because they see that, in spite of all their fine speeches, the fine election campaign the Liberals conducted last year, the compassion they said they felt for the most disadvantaged, they are even more extremist, more reactionary that the Conservatives were at times. They are even more extremist than what they denounced as Conservative policies when they were in the opposition.