Madam Speaker, the member across the way asked this question last week and it is a very good question. It is an issue that gripped us as soon as the provincial government in Ontario put forth this tax, which in my view is grossly unfair when it applies to our Canadian Forces members. The Minister of National Defence feels the same way.
In fact, I spoke to the Minister of National Defence today and he was drafting another stern response to the provincial minister of health asking him to drop this particular tax against those Canadian Forces members who live in Ontario and have been charged this tax.
The member knows full well that the provincial government does what it wishes to do. We do not control the provincial government and when it instituted this tax, our recourse was to address the issue immediately with it, which is what was done by the Minister of National Defence in 2004.
The premium, as the member correctly pointed out, applies to all individuals in the province of Ontario, and I might say bizarrely, whether or not they have access to the health care system or not. Nevertheless, the minister has approached both the minister of health and the minister of finance in Ontario to highlight the gross unfairness of this tax as it applies to Canadian Forces members.
What have we done? The minister has addressed it exactly the same way that the member mentioned, through the post living differential. We have also applied it through increases in wages across the board to CF members. In fact, if the member were to take note and look at the wages of the CF members over the last two to three years, the wages of CF members have gone up quite considerably as a result of our government's initiative to support the men and women, and their families in the great work that they do in the defence of our country and in the defence of our interests abroad.
Specifically, with CF members and their families in Ontario, we are trying to deal with the post living differential which is a cost of living allowance in a way. It is called the PLD. We use the PLD to develop some kind of fairness across the board, so that persons living in a high expense area will be compensated for that because they are moved around at the request of the defence department.
One of the ways that we are trying to accommodate and address this situation is through the PLD. Beyond that the minister, as I said, is working very hard to put pressure on the provincial government to stop and remove this grossly unfair tax on our CF members in Ontario.