Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Finance is indeed the appropriate minister to address this issue, and not the Minister of Environment, because the government acknowledges today, by his presence as its spokesman, that the issue of carbon emissions and the Liberals' so-called price on carbon is an attempt by the government to raise money for its own operations and not to protect the environment for Canadians.
What I am surprised to have learned from the member's speech is not what he said but what he did not say. His department has done detailed studies about the cost of his government's carbon tax to Canadians, and it has broken down those costs by income quintile; that is to say, the very poor, the poor, the middle class, the affluent, and the rich. His department has information on what that tax will cost people in each of those groups. However, in access to information requests my office has in its possession, the numbers are actually blacked out. In other words, the government does not want Canadians to know what the carbon tax will cost families and what impact it will have on the poverty rate and on the gap between rich and poor.
Will the minister rise today and fill in the blanks that exist in the publicly released documents and tell us what the tax will cost those families?