Here is another Liberal who graduated to that other place after they were elected. This is what he said: “The GST has undermined Canadians' confidence in the fairness of our tax system”. That is exactly what this motion is talking about, the unfairness.
There is an old saying my dad used to remind us of. He said that if you are going to play with fire you are probably going to get burnt. This is what the Quebec government was doing with the GST. It saw the federal government raking in the dollars and it figured, why not harmonize it, broaden it a bit and then rake in some more money. All of a sudden, it realized that its economy was stopping, that it was deadening itself, it was killing itself. That is what was happening. Then the pain started coming and it did not know how to cure that pain.
This reminds me of another little incident with my two older children when they were about five or six years old. My wife came to me one noon and said, “Jake, we have a pocket gopher in our garden eating all our vegetables. You better get a gopher trap and catch that varmint”. What did I do? I went out and put a trap in the hole the gopher had dug and covered it up, never suspecting that my two youngsters were watching to see how I did it. That is what the Quebec government was doing. It was watching the federal government putting on taxes.
Within an hour my kids thought there should be some results. When you do something you have to have results. They tried to uncover the hole and they got their hands in the gopher trap and ow, it hurt. My son and daughter came screaming home, “Dad, help, help”. That is what the Bloc is saying today, “Help. There is pain”.
What did I do? I had to reduce my kids' pain. I took the trap off. But if we look at what the Bloc did to soften the pain, they put a gopher trap on the other hand and then they really had pain. And now it is really hurting. They created it themselves. How can they blame the federal government? They looked in the mirror to see how it was working.