Home heating fuel is a very good example as well. With the price of energy going up, particularly the price of natural gas, a lot of ordinary folks who are on a very tight budget or on a fixed income have real difficulty paying the 7% on a home heating bill that may have been $75 or $80 a few years ago and is today maybe $150 or $250, depending on where one lives. The GST adds an awful lot in costs for the ordinary consumer who is paying the heating bill.
I think a measure of a society is to have a taxation system based on the ability to pay. That is the most important part of this. It should be based on ability to pay. Our party, the NDP, realizes, of course, that there should be a very important role in our society for government. In the last few years the role of government has diminished too much in terms of deregulation, privatization and cutbacks to social programs. Health funding is the best example of that. We have a health funding crisis in the country. The federal government cut back by billions of dollars transfers to the provinces for health care. The member for Winnipeg North Centre, who is our critic, knows the cost of that to ordinary people across the country.
We do need taxation revenue coming in, but the principle is to find the money on the basis of the ability to pay. The taxation system in the country should become more progressive, not less progressive. To do that I think we eventually have to phase out the GST, to roll it back from 7% to 6% to 5% and to 4%. Eventually, when we have a fair taxation system and the economy grows and becomes stronger, we have to eliminate it altogether. Our party said that in 1991-92. That is what we said in the last campaign. That is what we say now. The goal is to eliminate the GST in the country in order to have a fairer taxation system.