Mr. Speaker, as the Deputy Prime Minister indicated at the time of her resignation, what she had promised was more than what the red book stated. Our promise is stated on page 22 of the red book, where we say that our goal is to harmonize the tax, to simplify the system, to have in Canada a sales tax system in which businesses need not be visited by auditors from two levels of government. This was stated very clearly on page 22 and remains very clear.
What the Minister of Finance said and what I have been repeating in this House is we wish we could have put this system in place sooner. That is what we were hoping to do. But since the provinces were involved, we had to get their consent.
So far, four provinces have consented. This does not apply to Alberta. We expect the remaining provinces to get on board shortly and we are disappointed that all the provinces did not readily endorse the program, as we had hoped. We had said we wished to achieve this goal this year and we hope that the provinces that are still not involved in the process will be by the end of this year.