Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague on being the first to ask a question within this 39th Parliament.
As I mentioned in my speech, this is a very exciting time. We are at the beginning of a new session with a new government, and we are all here to work together to ensure that the priorities of Canadians are addressed. We as a government want to work with MPs from other parties. We also need to recognize, however, that on January 23 Canadians voted for change. They voted for a change in government, for a change in the manner in which the government conducts itself and for a change in policies.
Each of us here knows that Canadians have voted for change and so we cannot have it both ways. We cannot on the one hand acknowledge that Canadians want change, but on the other not want anything to change. This is what we see in that question. There are parties that do not want change. They want their policies advanced as if there had been no election. Our government's priorities were presented to Canadians during this past election and Canadians voted in favour of the government and of these priorities.
In response to the member's question specifically, under the previous government the GST burden on ordinary, hard-working Canadians doubled from $15.9 billion to $31.8 billion. Canadians want some of their hard earned money back.