Mr. Speaker, I listened as carefully as I could to the speech just given and was, of course, very grateful again to our wonderful interpreters who allow me to hear a language that I cannot understand when it comes to me directly from the other person to my ears.
I would like to talk about the part of the hon. member's speech where he mentioned the inclusion of the municipalities, municipal governments, the cities, in terms of being able to now share the Ottawa wealth. I say that in quotation marks because I believe Ottawa takes way too much money away from Canadian citizens.
I, as I am sure are some of the Bloc members, am very concerned with respect to the jurisdictional question of the federal government becoming involved directly with municipal governments, whereas that, by our constitutional setup, is one that municipalities deal with the provincial governments.
I personally would like to see a much more strengthened equalization system right across the country so that part of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Constitution Act of 1982, is vigorously enforced. I believe in that, but there is a jurisdictional problem. I wonder whether the government might not be better off to simply vacate some tax room. For example, it collects billions of dollars in gasoline tax. If it were to remove itself from that tax and make the tax room available for the provinces, they could then distribute it to the municipalities based on needs, population and so on. It would be a very simple thing. It would have a zero cost of administration. I think it would wind up really meeting the needs of municipalities almost instantly in a very effective way. That would be much better than the plan that these Liberals have in mind now, although we do not yet really know for certain what it is.