Madam Speaker, the Bloc Québécois has done an estimate for each of the proposals it has submitted. Take for example assistance to remote regions, which is not in the bill. We estimate that this measure would have cost about $158 million for Quebec and $600 million nationally. For all of Canada, assistance to taxi drivers would be $17.5 million; to independent truckers, $75 million; to farmers, $250 million; to logging companies, $50 million. That gives a general idea of what we wanted on this side.
On the other hand, where would this money come from? It would come from the contingency fund that the government has set aside in its estimates for extraordinary circumstances. I hope that we all consider the rise in gas prices that we have seen to be an extraordinary circumstance. Otherwise we are giving a free pass to the oil companies. In any case, its economic impact is extraordinary.
To answer the hon. member, it is very important that we bravely draw $500 million from the extra profits of the oil companies. To date, the government has not been imaginative enough to find any solutions other than helping out seniors and people with children—as is entirely proper—since administrative mechanisms already exist for them.
The Minister of Finance has openly admitted before the Standing Committee on Industry, Natural Resources, Science and Technology that there was no mechanism for making payments to other people, so therefore he was not going to grant them assistance. This response does not seem particularly astute, but in reality it conceals an even deeper reason: the implication is that the Minister of Finance did not want to further tax the oil companies so that this assistance can be paid for.
That woman from my riding, 35 or 40 years of age, earning $9 an hour, who has to travel 10 or 12 kilometres per day and lives alone, should have been entitled to some form of allowance. That money could have been taken right out of the extra profits of the oil companies: that would have seemed completely natural.
The bill should be amended so that we can get that additional money from the oil companies to help our loggers, our farmers, our independent truckers and the people in our remote regions. That way, all of these people would be able to deal with the repercussions, which are similar to those of the depression of 1930. Before that date, people were stripped of their purchasing power. The same thing has been done in this gasoline crisis, especially to the people who make the economy work. We expect the government to make this effort and to have the courage to take a significant amount back from the oil companies, so as to then give it to the people who have been hurt in their pocketbooks and dearly need that money to make ends meet every month.