And Duke, and so we did. So in this case must the provinces recognize that obligation.
What we have here is an official opposition putting forward a motion to say that somehow the federal government should just close its eyes and go away. This is the same party whose current leader, whose new leader, by the way, was professing to be concerned about transfer payments to health care, never acknowledging and recognizing the transfer of tax points that has occurred for the last many years and the relationship between the federal government and the provinces.
Tax points, as we well know, are simply the authority passed on from the federal government, which will vacate a certain position of taxation authority and transfer that authority it to the provincial governments. They can then turn around, using the tax points and the taxing authority vacated by the federal government, and collect that taxation. People will know when they file their income tax and calculate how much they owe federally, that they also have a formula right in the same document that allows them to calculate how much they owe provincially.
Therefore, provincial governments indeed collect taxation and collect income tax in much of the taxation that they collect. By the way, they are happy to do this. They are not exactly offering it back to us. There are members in our caucus who would say that if the provinces do not recognize that we give them this taxing authority, which in effect should be part of the entire transfer payment calculation, and if they will not acknowledge the fact that the federal government vacated that area to give it over to them, then maybe we should just eliminate tax points, collect all the taxes and transfer the cash.