I think most people in the room would not be familiar with the seminal piece of work that the Prime Minister put together when he was the associate deputy minister of finance in 2005, called “A Plan for Growth and Prosperity”, which was published by the Department of Finance.
Going back to the Prime Minister's own microeconomic framework.... There are two parts, two key things, in an economy. First, there are people. We have, in Canada, about 41 million people who are hard-working, diligent and really talented. Then you have how they're organized and what they have to work with, so you have labour, and then you have the productivity and how you support those people.
Anything you can do at this point.... I think, based upon the government's statements, it's focused more on the productivity side: what tools you provide to people, how you organize them with different types of businesses, and what type of additional infrastructure needs to be put in place so that people can be more productive, earn bigger paycheques and pay more taxes so that we can reduce that deficit.
I think those are probably some of the most important things that I expect to see coming out of budget 2025, as well as something you alluded to on the people side: investments or supports for people for retraining. I'm around for 166 days. Following that, I hope to go back to my old job, unless Parliament deigns to keep me around for longer. If I'm looking for a new job, I'm definitely going to be counting on employment insurance and some of the retraining programs. I'm 50 years old; I think I still have a couple of years left to make a contribution to the economy. That's something else that we're going to be looking at for budget 2025, because of 100,000 involuntary job losses over the summer. The labour market is a lagging indicator, so all of those people are going to be looking for new jobs. They're not necessarily going to find jobs in the fields they were in previously, in what they were trained for. I think all of us know that that's where the government can step in and provide them with some sort of support so that they can make the best contribution possible to the Canadian economy and society.