The members opposite are laughable. But I am not going to take the bait because it is not worth it on these small points.
The overall picture has to be presented. Yes, it is true that Quebec receives more social band-aids, because its levels of poverty and unemployment are perhaps worse than they would have been if the federal government had treated Quebec fairly for the last 105 years.
As I said earlier, we are mentioning this not to complain but to set the record straight and to put the debate in proper perspective. Furthermore, the Leader of the Official Opposition just made a thinly veiled suggestion that this is one national standard Quebec finds to its liking.
I did not want to get into the federalist argument that, as the spoiled child of the Canadian federation, Quebec receives more than its share of equalization payments. Given what we have been hearing for weeks from the other side, and what I heard just minutes ago from the leader of the opposition, I have no choice but to direct my presentation on Bill C-65 to that aspect of the matter.
Getting back to the bill, in the days to come we intend to go into further detail on certain aspects of the review of the equalization payment system, on certain parameters such as the demands brought to the table over the past 10 years, not just by Quebec but by a number of provinces, particularly those relating to the way property tax is handled. We are going to address these further in committee.
We already have a meeting scheduled this week with people from Finance, in order to go still further into the technical aspects that are different. There are, for instance, differences from the formula used in the past five years. We are going to continue our efforts and will be making recommendations to our party based on the final outcome of this.
In the meantime, I would ask my Liberal and Reform colleagues to take a look at equalization payments. It is not all that complicated, a matter of taking an hour or two to read some very well prepared documents. Some are summaries, while others are a bit more complex. One can have a good grasp of the principles of equalization payments even without the latter, however.
There is nothing magical about equalization payments, nothing arbitrarily determined. The process is one of negotiation, based on parameters that are highly technical but can be verified in all the provinces of Canada. It is being rather lazy intellectually to say “The system must be torn up, got rid of, dumped. We must start all over again, reform the whole business”.
In my view, the federal taxation system is not all bad. It contains some things that are understandable, and the equalization payment system may be one of them.
I thank my hon. colleagues for their attention.