Madam Speaker, with respect to the public service, we will not do away with the public service act or the protection which any public servant has through the Public Service Commission and the rules regarding employment equity. If the hon. member thinks we are, he is wrong.
The beauty of the way we are going about the layoff is that it is being undertaken in consultation and in co-operation with the public sector unions as well as with management in Treasury Board and the various departments. That is why we have something which can work and which will achieve the level of substitution on a voluntary basis that we were hoping for.
In terms of PUITTA, members will understand that in the last budget year we spent $249 million reimbursing public utilities which had been privatized and which were in the provinces. We were reimbursing them for the income tax we collected.
How did they get into the private sector in the provinces anyway? They were privatized originally by the provincial governments in order to make them more efficient and in order to create capital funds for deficit reduction for the provinces. Now they are working in the private sector. They were a function and a creation of the provincial governments.
These utilities and the provincial governments were insisting that we continue to give them $249 million a year. Were the provinces prepared to rebate the corporate taxes collected by the provinces to these utilities? Not one was, even though they were creations of the provincial governments. If the provincial governments are not prepared to rebate the corporate taxes to them, why should the federal government? It is a real anomaly.