Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for his speech. The credit I will give him is that he is one of the few Conservatives over there who, while he has some notes, will speak extemporaneously from time to time. It is great. It is a tradition in the House that we have sometimes lost. Certainly from the government benches, we see page after page of prepared notes from the Prime Minister's Office. They read them off faithfully, and that is very nice.
With respect to this budget bill, because that is what we are dealing with, while I am tempted to get into the larger economic issues that the hon. member talked about, what we have in front of us tonight is a bill of over 360 pages that affects more than 60 laws currently on the books. One of the aspects buried within this bill is a tax treaty with the United States. The U.S. is our largest trading partner, and it is the most significant tax treaty that we could see.
I wonder if the member has any misgivings at all about the implications for the up to one million Canadians who would be impacted and have their personal tax information sent on to the IRS without their even knowing.
We asked for a notification in the bill to simply say that the bank should notify those people who have their information passed to the IRS.
I wonder if the member would be in support of that amendment to this very bad deal, an amendment to at least allow Canadians the knowledge that their information is being passed on to the IRS.