Madam Speaker, I cannot speak right now about what the punishment is going to be for various members of parliament, but I can assure Canadians this evening that when it comes to this issue, this party, unlike that party, knows it implicitly. More importantly, it does not play the kind of hair splitting recommendations where members selectively pick certain parts of this wonderful document. They have given credit to one simple area.
On the question of the resolution, the member across has conspicuously forgotten that as part of the condition of that recommendation, it recommended that if the GST was removed from other taxes, the federal government should undertake measures to ensure the resulting savings were passed on to consumers and not merely absorbed by the oil industry. They cannot talk out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand they want the resolution. On the other hand they do not want to accept the mechanism, which is to give it directly to Canadians.
That member, her party and her leader today had an opportunity to give the tax back to Canadians, assuming of course it was going to bring down the level of gasoline and somehow remove the hardship on Canadians. I know Canadians understand this, that they are johnnies-come-lately on that side. They are shamelessly sitting here and trying to pass off their defence of an industry that for the past three years has been making excessive profits, cutting back production and creating all sorts of disruptions in a country where we have paid through our taxes to make sure that industry received more benefits than others.
I suggest they start talking about the oil patch, the difficulty Canadians are facing and understand how dangerous the resolution is without the amendment and give Canadians an opportunity to receive those taxes, not the oil industry.