We said the government needs to balance the budget because Canadians need to be able to afford to maintain Canada's social programs at their current level. There are what I would call demographically driven increases inherent in the current expenditures. As our society ages, the government is spending a lot more money on old age security, transfers for health, etc. Just to stand still, there will have to be either a decrease in other program costs or an increase in tax revenues. That's just a fact, because those demographically driven expenses are going up. We said we'd have to look at it one way or the other.
Which way would we prefer? We came forth with expenditure reductions through program reviews, doing things more efficiently, and tax simplification so that both sides of the table, CRA and the government, can save lots of money by skinnying down that big fat tax act to something smaller.