Madam Speaker, I enjoyed the member's speech. It was excellent because the member's riding of course is very natural resource dependent, as mine is. I thought it was a very good speech aside from the advertising part of it. It was pretty good up until the last, then he really blew it, in my opinion.
He clearly did not get the message that my colleague from Medicine Hat was pointing out, a message that he should know in his part of the world. That is the fact that if we cannot attract investment and cannot create development, particularly in our part of the world, in the natural resources sector, we do not have the capacity to look after the poor and the hungry, health care, education and all the rest of that. The message that we are sending is that the level of corporate taxation is so important to the ability of a country, or a province or territory to provide services to its members. Therefore, I am disappointed with the last remarks.
Overall, I could not agree more with all the arguments that the member made about the value of the bill and what we are trying to do. However all those issues and arguments were valid in the year 2000. His government and the now leader of the Liberal party, the soon to be prime minister, apparently could not see the value of those arguments back in the 2000 budget when they cut the corporate tax rate from 28% to 21% for everyone but the resource industries. Therefore, I have to ask the member this. Why could the then finance minister not see then what he can see now in the arguments he has presented?