Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this debate. It has been interesting today because I think we all recognize that what is happening here is not good enough.
In general there is an inadequate explanation from the finance department to parliamentarians of what we are voting on today. Most members do not understand how the equalization system works. I rather doubt that most government members know how it works. Yet they will be told how to vote and that is what will happen.
I have a question for my colleague who gave a very good intervention that has to do with the debate between him and the member for Broadview—Greenwood. The member for Broadview—Greenwood said explicitly that he was a passionate interventionist. That is a quotation from Hansard yesterday. He said the same thing today. He said he believed in intervention and believed in it passionately.
The equalization payment system takes through taxation money from people in all provinces and distributes it to seven provinces. The result is that the federal government, by intervening in this way, lands up taking money that is paid by poor people in one of the three have provinces and distributing it per capita to people who are very well off in the have not provinces. We have a government intervention that effectively transfers money from poor people to rich people in different parts of the country.