Earlier, Mr. Carrier brought up the forestry sector with you. I will share with you our political analysis of the situation.
We believe that it was a mistake to systematically and across the board reduce the taxes paid by large corporations. By definition, a company that had not made a profit and thus did not pay taxes did not benefit from these reductions. Inevitably, the oil patch and the banks were the ones that received the lion's share of these tax reductions. The forestry and manufacturing sectors were already in big trouble before the current crisis.
We also believe that, since the Second World War, successive generations of Canadians, who live in the second largest country in the world in terms of surface area and who helped build the country and give it value, have accomplished a tour de force, especially given that today, the population is just over 30 million. However, in our opinion, the economy has been substantially destabilized over the past three or four years. That is our political argument.
Considering what I said to you earlier, even though I do not want to lead you down a political path, according to the way you see things, is it part of your written or assumed mandate to adopt a balanced approach? Despite the fact that you must make a profit, do you still try to help sectors that are important in a given province but that are in trouble, like the forestry and manufacturing sectors? Do you try to get things back on track to avoid job losses in these sectors, which have been so hard hit?