Good morning. I want to thank all of you. Your presentations were excellent. Unfortunately, five minutes is really not enough to ask all the questions.
I want to begin with Mr. Richardson.
I will set the charts aside because they are always a bit misleading. I would like to focus on the tables you have submitted. You are telling us that the income inequality issue is relative because an increase in the Gini coefficient is not that bad, since the redistribution factor has not decreased. So the situation is not so bad, relatively speaking.
However, when I look at the figures, and especially those since 1994, I see that there are few changes to the Gini coefficient in Canada before taxes and transfers—be it for all families or economic families. Yet there is a marked increase in the Gini coefficient—so an increase in inequalities—after taxes and transfers. That increase is about 10% in both cases. I would go as far as to say that this correlates with the fact that the redistribution factor dropped by 20% during that time.
Would I be wrong to believe that, since 1994, the redistribution effect of Canadian policies has been decreasing significantly, thus leading to an increase in inequalities based on the Gini coefficient, after taxes and transfers? So there is a lot less redistribution in our system.