Mr. Speaker, I will use the same themes that the hon. member opposite used: misleading, hypocritical and self-serving but I will throw them back at him.
The hon. member is misleading the Canadian people. The auditor general did not qualify the financial statements of the Government of Canada. He made an observation. We disagree about that observation. That is entirely permissible and within what is appropriate under generally accepted accounting standards. The hon. member knows that.
The hon. member also said the tax is not revenue neutral. I ask him to prove that. That is untrue, it is revenue neutral.
It is interesting under hypocritical. I had the privilege to work with the hon. member. He worked diligently with other members of his party on the committee that went across the country looking into replacements for the GST. I will tell who is hypocritical. The hon. member supports harmonization. He neglected to tell us that.
Under self-serving, it is interesting. The hon. member attacks the transitional assistance but I have never heard him attack the $1.6 billion paid to western grain farmers when the Crow rate subsidy was removed. Not a word. Here we have a member from one region of the country criticizing transitional assistance going to another area of the country and telling them what is good for them but never rising to criticize similar transitional assistance in his own backyard.
This is a quiz show if you will, Mr. Speaker. I ask the hon. member one further question. Who said the following? "I want something that works. If we had one value added tax, one base, one bureaucracy to collect it, the manufacturers and businesses in Ontario would save over $1 billion by being able to deduct those costs that cannot be deducted today on the sales tax. It has been one of the areas of a major competitive disadvantage that Ontario manufacturers have had and Ontario businesses have had. I say stop the rhetoric, stop the politics, stop the finger pointing. Get on with harmonization and simplification of the GST or whatever the new initials are, along with the PST". Who said that? I will give the
hon. member a hint. He is now the premier of the province of Ontario.