The World Bank has done massive studies on this and poverty alleviation around the world. They have shown that competitive, productive markets have removed over one billion people around the world—and I think it's a billion and a half—from the lowest levels of poverty.
You look at the empirical evidence, and there's no question that when you have a strong and vibrant economy, it raises the standard of living for everyone, not just the people at the top. There's no doubt about that, I don't believe. I don't think my views are any different from those of Don Drummond or David Dodge, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, or the people who are so-called “blue Liberals”, if you want to call them that.
Very quickly, to unpack one more very important point you raised, Arthur Okun, the great Liberal economist in the sixties, wrote a famous book called Equality and Efficiency. He said that there's a constant balance in public policy in a mixed economy between, let's call it, policies of social justice versus policies of economic growth. He said you have to strike the right balance because you need the growth to pay for the social justice policies.
I think that right now there's more of an imbalance. We focus so much on income redistribution, which is important, but at the same time we have forgotten, or we're neglecting—and that's exactly what the former Liberal deputy prime minister is saying—and are not focused on policies of growth. We have domestic investment leaving our country.