Madam Speaker, I appreciate the kind words of the member opposite.
The steps now being taken in order to deal with the shortcomings of the tax in pricing provision are a typical Liberal approach: "There is no sense in admitting that we made a mistake and drop the whole thing but let us patch it up".
The member and I sat together in finance committee hearings about the GST. The length of the horror stories about the different provisions and difficulties that business has was caused by a previous government's unwillingness to do the right thing and say: "We made a mistake. Let's drop it. Let us go, say, for a broad based tax. Instead of 7 per cent, let us have it on everything but only 4 per cent". That is what we heard all the time.
I predict that if the member is going to sit in the finance committee two years from now he will hear horror stories about the administrative costs, the difficulties of going from bin pricing to all kinds of other provisions that he has mentioned. The government is going in the right direction but why does it not swallow its pride and say: "We'll suspend the tax in pricing provision for this legislation in order to get the other advantages".
I agree with him. This is why with all intellectual honesty we came to Ottawa and said that when the government does something right, proposes something that is good for Canada, we will support it. We will not play pure politics. That is why we said in our minority report that we believe harmonization of provincial sales taxes and the GST is a good idea. We still think so.
However, we did not endorse and we cannot honestly endorse the imposition of such a tax in a particular region only and having the rest of the country pay substantial sums for this to be acceptable to those regions.
I feel that the thrust of what I said remains unchallenged by the points made by the member opposite. This is not a good piece of legislation. At the very least Canadians should expect that the tax in pricing provision be removed.