Mr. Speaker, I have two answers for my hon. colleague. First, when they talk about 41%, they are playing with the numbers.
We can say that the taxpayer is one taxpayer. When the Liberals in the government play with that, they are just talking about money coming out of different parts of the pocket, but it is coming out at the provincial level.
The Liberals keep saying it is not 16%, it is really 41%. I go back to Mr. Romanow's report which said, as have a number of other studies, that the federal government--ignoring the playing with the tax credits, the tax transfers and all the complexities that are part of that--is only directly paying 16% at this point and that 16% must be moved to 25% as quickly as possible. Mr. Romanow said that should be phased in over the next five years.
We are saying to the government that it should stop playing with those numbers. Everybody agrees the government is only paying the 16%. It is fine if it wants to tax some credit for tax transfers, we will let it have that. However, we are saying that in absolute accurate dollars it must move from the 16% to the 25%. It is beyond debate at this point.