Madam Speaker, having listened to the member over the last 20 minutes, he has mentioned a number of things, some of which I would like to comment on and which require some clarification.
I am going to talk a little bit about the GST. I am sure it is a subject we are going to hear an awful lot about in the next election.
In the last budget the Liberal government announced that there would be no tax cuts until we could afford them and we could sustain them. No tax cuts. In the next election there is no question that the Reform Party will be running on tax cuts. The Conservatives will be running on tax cuts. The Liberal government is going to say no tax cuts.
It is not enough simply to look at the bottom of the end result. The Reform Party and the Conservative Party are a little bit different; one is when it is balanced and one is immediate. There are conditions. The situation is there are conditions and some other matters.
The member must understand that we cannot use just one phrase or one word to say what represents the position. We have to look at all of the terms and conditions that are associated with tax cuts or no tax cuts.
The Liberal Party has said that we are going to have tax cuts when we can afford them. We are not opposed to tax cuts; we are going to have them. Having established that, let us talk about the word "scrap". Canadians are going to want to know more of the facts about what happened.
If we go back to the beginning of this Parliament, the finance committee was immediately asked to undertake a study of the alternatives to the consumption tax, the GST. I participated in this all-party committee. It held 35 meetings with hundreds of witnesses. It analysed and assessed for months and months at least 25 alternatives to the GST, including a modified GST or other forms of consumption tax. All members know that because all parties were represented in the finance committee.
Let us think about this. If in fact the government's position was to scrap the GST with no replacement, to just get rid of it the way those members have been trying to suggest, then why is it that the finance committee spent almost a year studying alternatives? Why did the public or the opposition parties not go ballistic about why we were breaking our promise of scrapping it with no alternatives? They did not do that. They did not complain when we were studying alternatives because they knew and Canadians knew that the undertaking of the government was to replace the GST with a revenue neutral-meaning not getting rid of the $18 billion-harmonized system with the provinces.
Some Canadians will say that they did not see the red book. I understand that because there were not enough produced for each and every Canadian. However, each and every member who ran on that platform included the extract in their literature. I did and I know my constituents saw it.
In addition, all of the media reported on the platforms of each and every party including in detail the proposal to replace the GST with a revenue neutral harmonized tax. It was reported in the press.
Did some members of Parliament use a word or a phrase to describe the whole platform? Yes, that is true. Even in this House I know there is at least one member of the cabinet who stood up and said that we would scrap it. However, to suggest that to use a word or a simple description of a platform policy is not to be taken in isolation, one has to also impute that it involves the full conditions and terms under which it was said.
I will conclude by asking the member a question.