Mr. Speaker, we are going to have a lot of time to debate this, but I wanted to raise one aspect of this issue.
Currently, provincial sales tax is applied at every stage of the process of a product. There is PST on extracting a raw material. There is PST paid on that again when it is manufactured, and it cascades, so that ultimately, when the consumer purchases a finished product, provincial sales tax has been applied as a tax on a tax on a tax. It cascades through the system.
What that means is that the end product has an extraordinary amount of provincial sales tax incorporated into it. Under the harmonized system with the input tax credits, businesses are in fact going to get a substantial reduction in the cost of the end product being sold to the ultimate consumer.
This is the issue, and the member may have a comment about it: if businesses are going to save all this tax that they have been paying along the line, how are they going to reflect that savings in cash flow with respect to the ultimate price to consumers?