Madam Speaker, my hon. friend is quite correct in his analysis. Obviously, in some respects the easiest thing to do would be to deal with either excise tax or GST on fuel costs or gasoline costs.
However that would only address one part of the issue, which is transportation. If people are filling up their cars, that may have some relief in that specific area. The emphasis is on “may have” some relief in that area because all the evidence indicates that fuel oil companies will immediately fill whatever space is vacated by tax relief. Therefore would be counterproductive and it would not be of any benefit to Canadians.
The other thing is that it does not really help anyone who gets transportation in any other manner. If we take public transit we will not get any relief on the suggestion that we just simply deal with pump prices. So that makes no sense. If we went on the one side and just simply dealt with the tax relief at the pump, then probably we would not be able to distribute it as something in the order of about $800 million to various provinces and municipalities.
For instance, in the case of Ontario that means about $310 million will now come to Ontario for public transit initiatives. In the case of my friend, who is from British Columbia, just over $100 million, which no province could reasonably have anticipated would be coming in order to help with public transit initiatives.