It was inadvertent, Mr. Speaker, so I will withdraw it if that is your wish.
In any event, as I was saying, the government led by this Prime Minister shows no sign of emerging from its domestic or, at most, continental cocoon and seriously engaging the rest of the world.
These elements of our leader's economic plan were endorsed by a number of commentators, including an editorial from the Globe and Mail, from which I will quote briefly:
So far, the Tories have sent out precisely the wrong signals on the tax system. To pay for their flashy promise to trim two percentage points from the GST, they cancelled Liberal cuts that reduced the lowest personal income-tax rate to 15 per cent from 16 per cent.
Instead, the Conservatives hiked that rate to 15.5 per cent and reduced the GST to 6 per cent from 7. Income-tax cuts would be a far more effective tool for economic growth. At a time when Ottawa should be encouraging savings and investment instead of stimulating consumption, it would wrong-headed to cut the GST further to 5 per cent. Mr. Dion would rightly defer that plan, reduce income taxes, allow businesses to take faster writeoffs on equipment and introduce a tax benefit to ease the transition from welfare to work.
The editorial concludes by saying:
His economic prescriptions are welcome.
Sadly--