I would like to go back to the discussion we were having on your projections and the sustainable and renewable nature of the system we find ourselves in.
You already mentioned in the past the choices that were made and you said how they had more influence on the current state of the government's accounting records than any external factors. Let's go back to the issue of corporate tax cuts. That's part of our analysis of the situation. You must know about the Dutch disease or the Dutch syndrome, a term coined in the wake of what happened in the Netherlands during the 1960s, when major gas deposits were discovered off the coasts of the Netherlands. At the time, that had a significant impact on the value of the guilder, and the manufacturing sector was destroyed.
According to Statistics Canada, between 2004 and 2008, before the economic crisis, Canada had already lost 322,000 manufacturing jobs. This is still going on today. Are unfocused tax cuts, which by definition continue to benefit the companies that make the most money, meaning banks and oil companies, an accelerating factor? Is the shortfall you're talking about, the deficit—you are talking about a structural deficit—fed by this major trend?