Mr. Speaker, I listened to every word the member said and enjoyed her speech and her argument in favour of eliminating the GST on diapers for children. If I remember correctly, I believe she was the member who carried her first baby while she was a member of Parliament. It was interesting to watch that development, shall we say.
However I would like to thank her for bringing this issue up at this time. We remember it was the Liberals who said that they would eliminate the GST on everything. While her bill purports to favour eliminating it on this one item, the Liberals said that they would get rid of it, kill it, but of course that never happened.
As she said, diapers are necessities and certainly should come under the same category as food and other necessities of life. It also is interesting that we do not have exemptions for clothing which, in our climate, is pretty much essential. Beyond that, we also have GST on food. If we buy small quantities, such as five doughnuts, we have to pay GST, but if we buy six doughnuts we do not. There are many crazy anomalies in the GST program.
I would like to ask this member to comment further on whether it is a good idea to just keep adding lists of items that are exempted from the GST instead of dealing with the issue in its totality.