Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his thoughtful speech, which is very reflective of his thoughtful contributions to the finance committee when he sat on it. I appreciate that the member appreciates probably more than most the complexity of this issue and I want to get his sense of what his recommendation to the minister would be.
Essentially on the duty remission part we can simply let it lapse, in which case duty remissions come off at the end of this year. We could extend for a period of time. If so, what would be his recommendation in terms of a period of time? Or we could do a phase-out of either the people who are on the current list or the amount of the remission. In other words, we could scale it down from $30 million down to $20 million and then down to $10 million, for example, or something of that nature. I would be interested in the member's response on those three options.
Just to make it a little bit more complicated for the hon. member, would he do something as dramatic, so to speak, as implementing recommendation 2, which is the complete elimination of tariffs on textiles? That is in the order of a $75 million to $90 million item.
The first is a $30 million item. The other is a $90 million item. Would the member do those as independent silos, which appears to be the position being taken by the mover of the motion, or would the member do it in a phased, staged way while looking at the consequences of tariff reduction simultaneously? I appreciate that this is a fairly complex question. It may even be a little bit unfair, but it may give the House some feel for why this is something of a fairly complex issue and not necessarily something on which it is easy to criticize that the government has been dragging its feet.