Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the intention of the rebate is to help those who are in the most need of help. The easiest, most efficient way of doing that is to use some sort of income threshold for a household. I realize looking at need can be very complicated, but we wanted to have a system that could be administered easily and would enable us to be able to get the help out to people as quickly as possible.

Mr. Speaker, we need to have a cut off somewhere. No matter how we do it, it seems we will have some people who feel that their income is just above that threshold and they really need to have some help. We really have to have a threshold. It was felt that this one was the most efficient one in terms of administering it and one that was the fairest to most people.

Of course I will consider alternatives. As we speak, our staff are looking at this, but I have to say that given the need to get the rebate cheques out quickly, we need to have something that is fairly efficient to administer. Thank you.