Mr. Speaker, I thank the self-proclaimed rookie from Calgary Centre for this opportunity to discuss the GST report and to show by his motion support for what the majority of Liberals are trying to get toward.
What we are trying to do in this report is set the stage for some fundamental changes in the Canadian tax system and I would like to publicly thank my colleagues both on the government side and on the opposition side for their diligence.
There are only two members of the House of Commons committee on finance who have ever sat before on a House of Commons committee, the chairman and I, and it is a great tribute to the new members who brought such strength and wisdom and such diligence not only in Ottawa but across the country in the consideration of this very difficult piece of legislation.
It is old ground that this government inherited a very difficult tax. This tax is a very difficult one for Canadians. In the last few years it was a focal point for tax unrest and government unrest and there would indeed be many members of this House who are here today because of that general public unrest with the previous government.
We have taken this issue. It is one of the first things that we did when the House sat. I can remember presenting on behalf of the government the motion to the House of Commons committee in the first week of business in which we stated quite clearly in the speech from the throne and in the committee on the first day that we were going to fulfil the commitment from the red book.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to those in the former opposition caucus of the Liberal Party and in the office of the Leader of the Official Opposition for their work in preparing the red book.
I used to be very involved with the policy process of the Liberal Party of Canada and it took us years to get people to agree that the best way to succeed in politics was to present a clear mandate, a clear choice to Canadians as to what we intended to do in the government.
This red book is the first serious effort of a major party to present a document of substance and I think the fact that we have used it as a benchmark in our actions is a tribute to the Prime Minister and to his cabinet.
Our inquiry was in response to the red book commitment of the government to have the finance committee "report on all options for alternatives to the current GST", and "replace the GST with a system that generates equivalent revenues, is fairer to consumers and to small business, and minimizes disruption to small business, and promotes federal-provincial fiscal co-operation and harmonization".
That motion was passed unanimously by that committee on the first day of its business and all three parties voted to begin its work.
It was with a great deal of spirit of co-operation that witnesses were called, were questioned, and I think that the committee soon began to recognize the complexity of the GST issue as part of the consumption tax strategy of the national government.
It is not well known but the federal government entered the income tax field in 1917 in response to its fiscal prices during the first world war and the began to enter the consumption tax deal by various means in 1923.
Therefore the government has been involved with one form of consumption tax or another for the last 70 years. As one begins to reform these taxes, to restructure them and to build a new tax that is completely different than the previous GST which has, I must admit, been a great frustration for almost every Canadian I met, this committee showed a great deal of maturity to go through each of these issues.
Many Canadians, as I speak today, have not had an opportunity to read the report, as it was just tabled 48 hours ago and is in the beginnings of being distributed. The committee broke its work up into five areas. It looked at the history of the tax and why it was such a difficult tax. It looked at the fact that the GST became an opportunity lost.
I, as a member of the opposition-