Certainly, Mr. Speaker, fighting GST fraud is a significant activity of government. I did some of that when I was revenue minister. Those things can be done whether the GST is 6%, 5% or 7%.
The more fundamental point is that this is not trivial at all. We are talking about $5 billion or $6 billion per year of revenue for every GST point cut. We can do huge amounts of income tax cuts and huge amounts of social programming with that amount of money.
It is a gross waste of the fiscal capacity of a government to spend it on a GST cut for a penny or two on a cup of coffee when we consider that for two points of the GST we could have $10 billion, $11 billion or $12 billion per year, which would buy us a massive tax cut or a massive improvement in social programs.
I am not sure if the hon. member was listening to me, but the point is that the income trust policy results in less revenue for the government, not more revenue for the government. That is why I said it was a tax unfairness plan, not a tax fairness plan.
What I said earlier, and I will just repeat it very quickly, is that when these income trusts are bought out by pension plans and by private equity ventures, those pension plans and private equity ventures pay no tax or very little tax, whereas the previous owners of the income trusts paid a lot of tax.
Therefore, far from the government's policy adding to government revenues, as she said, it subtracts from government revenue to the tune of, with the last seven or eight acquisitions among income trusts, I think, those alone costing the government some $130 million a year.
I am afraid that the hon. member has her direction wrong. It will result in less revenue for the government, not more, and that is one of the virtues of the Liberal plan.