Madam Speaker, I would like to remind my distinguished colleague, the member for Mississauga South, a good-hearted man, a man of courage and incredible loyalty, that we are not in politics to fool the voters. You can fool people once, but you cannot fool them all the time.
When we look at the latest surveys on how much confidence people have in various professions, doctors top the list, used car salesmen are at the bottom and one up from them are politicians. Do you know why? Because certain politicians often suffer from the Pinocchio syndrome, as my colleague has just shown. He says for all to hear: "We never promised to abolish the GST". That is a lie. I do not say he is a liar, I say it is a lie.
All the CBC and TVA footage showed the Prime Minister of this country saying: "We will scrap the GST". And the Deputy Prime Minister, who was one of the rat pack and who held a major post in the last election campaign in 1993 said: "I will resign in the first 12 months if we do not abolish the GST". It took 28 months. We had to give her a shove. This resignation cost the public $500,000, so that she could turn around and get re-elected with a much smaller majority in Hamilton East.
I ask my distinguished colleague, a good-hearted and loyal man as I was saying earlier, to find me six copies of his red book in French, because I need them badly in Frontenac-Mégantic for the next election.