Mr. Speaker, the member raises three points.
On the first point, and maybe he has not been listening, we only have one plan for income trusts. It consists of a 10% tax that is refundable to all Canadian residents, and a moratorium on the creation of new income trusts. It is very simple. He should be able to absorb that.
Second, on the question of the fiscal imbalance, when does one know that a fiscal imbalance is no longer there? Given the finance minister's referral to the long, tiring, unproductive era of bickering between the federal and provincial governments now being over, maybe a fiscal imbalance no longer exists when everybody is happy.
If that is the government's interpretation of fiscal imbalance, then we are in a greater imbalance today than we have ever been. We have a member of Parliament crossing the floor because of being kicked out of his caucus. We have three extremely angry provinces and five unhappy provinces. Is that the government's definition of balance? I would have said that is a highly unbalanced situation. Are we to say that the fiscal imbalance is solved merely because the finance minister declares it to be so?
None of this makes any sense unless the government members have some definition of fiscal imbalance and what it means, and whether this thing exists or does not exist.
On the subject of Ontario, the member is in no place to speak for Ontario, when the government ripped hundreds of millions from Ontario in the Canada-Ontario agreement and when the Ontario government had slammed the government for its environment policy and for its redistribution policy of creating new seats. Selective quotes will not do the job.