Your question with respect to the GST is a good question.
From an economic policy perspective, all taxes are not created equal. It's extremely important to think about the incentives and the impact that each type of tax has on the economy before deciding what is the optimal tax rate to cut. In our view, cutting the GST was not necessarily the right tax to cut. That's simply because it's a consumption tax, and consumption taxes do not result in negative impacts to productivity, for example, or incentives to work, and things like that.
It relates to the structural deficit issue, which was your question. We think a structural deficit can be avoided if we do the right things. Did it result in deficits being larger than otherwise? Of course it did. A 1% cut in the GST is about $5.5 billion. It certainly had a big impact on government revenues.
With respect to EI, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce has put out a paper on reforming Canada’s employment insurance system. I would be very happy to forward it to the committee.
We believe the overriding goal when it comes to employment insurance reform is to ensure that the costs do not escalate to a point where it becomes very costly and unattractive for employers to hire new workers, and ensure at the same time that the benefits are not enhanced to such an extent that there's very little incentive on the part of employees to go out and look for work.