Mr. Speaker, I will very briefly answer the hon. member; what he said borders on the unparliamentary.
I would ask my colleague, one of the vice-chairmen of the finance committee, to read our minority report. We tabled a minority report, with our own resources. We had it translated into English at our own expense and we tabled it. We tabled our minority report in both official languages for the press conference two days ago. You were not able to provide us with this translation on time to analyse the preliminary copy of the report.
So I think that our colleague should not boast that he has not read our minority report, when it was in both official languages and translated by the Bloc Quebecois, because the government party did not deign to accommodate us, except if we appended our minority report to the committee's report. We exercised our free choice and chose to table it separately. I think that we made a good decision.
I would say, Mr. Speaker, that our alternative, if the hon. member would read our report, if he would be so gracious as to read our report as we have read the report of the Liberal majority several times, in English and in French, if he would read the minority report, he would see that the Bloc Quebecois is keeping the Prime Minister's promise to abolish the GST and transfer this field of taxation to the provinces.
We thus avoid two things: We avoid a sixth failure in constitutional negotiations between the federal government and the provinces. After the health forum, interprovincial trade and so on, we can add another failure because the Conservatives tried for two years to negotiate harmonization with the provinces, as the majority report proposes. So we avoid those frictions. We avoid three things. The second thing we avoid is continued duplication and overlap.
We give the government an opportunity to withdraw from certain spending fields in order to compensate for the transfer of the GST to the provinces. Thirdly, we are helping to clean up the mess that the government's finances are in. The Liberal members should thank us for the work we did, seriously, because it is the only alternative left at this time, after the many statements from provincial premiers and especially from great experts, and I am thinking of Yvon Cyrenne of Martin, Chabot, Paré & Associates, for example-