A partner in crime. A very good comment.
I did the right thing. I took the gopher trap off my kids' hands which relieved the pain totally and made them happy again. That is what the Quebec government should have done. It should have removed the tax. Instead it harmonized it and created twice the pain. If you want to help heal a problem, you do not make it bigger, you put something on it to cure it.
I want to give another couple of examples of how they could have listened to the Liberals when they were in opposition and how they could have solved the problem. This is what the present finance minister said in the Montreal Gazette on April 4, 1990: “I would abolish the GST. The manufacturers sales tax is a bad tax and there is no excuse to repeal one bad thing by bringing in another”. The finance minister admitted that.
The finance minister had a good idea. He knew what he was talking about. On June 21, 1994, after he was elected he became the finance minister, and this is what he said in the Ottawa Citizen : “It is almost impossible to design a tax that is more costly and more inefficient than the GST”. He had the answer.
We were sitting on this side, waiting for the GST to be killed, to be abolished, to be scrapped. What did the Bloc and the Quebec government do? They said, “Let us jump on the gravy train. Let us get some extra taxes. Let us make things roll in this country. Throw in another tax. That is the way to go”.
Here is what a writer said in 1996 about the GST. I am citing this to show how destructive the GST has been to our economy. He said: “My message to the Prime Minister comes after yesterday's chilling report from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation which shows that new home construction across the country crashed to a 35-year low last year. That makes 1995 the worst year for our homebuilders since 1960, outstripping the pain of 1994 when we hit a 10-year low, and for Toronto it means a loss of another 10,000 construction jobs”.
Are we surprised why the Quebec government is feeling the pain? I am sure it hit Montreal. I am sure it hit Quebec. That is just in the housing industry. What did it do to the service industries?
I can remember that in Winnipeg in my own province it killed tourism. It killed restaurants, small businesses and the service sector. As the member said, we cannot even afford to get a haircut because we have to pay tax on it.