Mr. Speaker, it funny the way things change over time. Today, the Liberals are being quite touchy. Reform members are telling them that during the 1993 election campaign, they openly condemned the GST. Liberals are now raising questions of privilege and using every tactic in the book, suggesting it is unparliamentary to remind them that they condemned the GST during the election campaign.
But we have seen a minister in this House, the Deputy Prime Minister at that, who was forced to resign or felt she had to resign because she had stated that if the GST was not abolished, she would resign.
She did resign, and she was re-elected. It is as if I, a sovereignist member, said: "If Quebec does not secede some day, I will get re-elected as a Liberal member". God forbid. It would be unthinkable. If I did that, you would say I was dishonest. I do not mean to apply this word to my colleagues. I simply want to remind you that the Deputy Prime Minister said during the election campaign: "If this tax is not abolished, I will resign".
During the 1993 election campaign, the Prime Minister said: "We will scrap the GST". Then, on May 2, 1994, he said: "We hate this tax, and we will get rid of it".
The bill before us today is even more underhanded than the scheming of those who claimed they would abolish it. Not only are they keeping it and pushing it in the western provinces, they are redeeming themselves for the next election by harmonizing it in the maritimes.
The hon. member for Beauséjour is puffing up his chest, but he was not so proud, not so long ago, when the people in his riding were angry. I even saw on television someone roll up his sleeves and invite him to step outside the assembly hall. He was not puffing up his chest then as he is doing now. He let that guy speak, I am telling you, I saw it on television.
But if we dig a little deeper, we see that this government is trying to buy back the maritimes after closing some military bases there. That decision was not very well received. Now, they are giving them a present valued at $920 million for a start. That is to buy the coming election, to try to buy relative peace, because the people there nonetheless understand to a large extent that the government is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. This gift is a sort of Trojan horse, but for many people, it is something that seems, for the moment, acceptable.
I listened to the parliamentary secretary who just spoke. She presented the GST as something completely harmless; she said it was simply replacing the old manufacturers' sales tax. Yet they did call it the goods and services tax, since it not only replaced the old 9 per cent federal manufacturers' tax but extended it to other economic sectors that had not been affected until then. The new tax now applied to legal services, for example, or to any other kind of service for that matter.
That is probably why, acting in good faith that proved short-lived, the Prime Minister, then leader of the official opposition, rose up against this tax. He expressed outrage in public, as he did in his red book and during the 1993 election campaign.
This famous tax shows that the government in place, just like its predecessors-and it is a Liberal government that was responsible for the first deficit in our history-claims that cutting the heart vein just before the blood gets to the heart is good for the taxpayer and for all aspects of our economy and allow the patient to live longer. In so doing, the government is revealing its inability to find other ways of collecting taxes and generating government revenue, which is disastrous. It is tragic.