Mr. Speaker, I certainly welcome the thrust of my colleague's speech. He is absolutely right. This is framework legislation that needs to be in place. Three Atlantic provinces back in the 1990s under the Liberal government harmonized their sales tax and there are two provinces today.
This change to federal legislation is needed to ensure that provinces have the full right to choose whether to harmonize their tax system. I want to compliment him on that aspect of the speech.
I want to ask him a question in a very friendly manner. He is fond of quoting Don Drummond, a good friend of both of ours, with respect to the economy. He talked about the recession made in Canada by the Conservative government. I want to allow him a chance to correct that and say that it was a global synchronized recession that Canada entered into later and in fact was much less affected by than were other countries.
In terms of his speech, I certainly welcome his comments that this legislation is needed to allow provinces to make their own decisions as to whether they want to harmonize with the federal sales tax or not.