I'm going to use a few examples of what happened in Quebec.
We must remember that, in the mid‑1990s, federal transfers were partially cut. The Quebec government had developed the practice of a fairly consensual approach with all social stakeholders. It was working well. People agreed that cutbacks were inevitable, except that the government was in a hurry. To reduce the payroll, it offered a voluntary departure program, saying that it was an open-door policy and that anyone who wanted to leave was free to do so.
The lessons we learned were that those who left were the ones we wanted to keep, and those we wanted to let go stayed. We lost out, we drained our expertise.
We have to remember what happened in the health care sector in Quebec, namely that we still have problems with nurses and doctors who date back to that era. We have to be careful about the mechanisms we put in place.
We want to support the public, but is it a good idea to lower taxes? Raising taxes is the hardest thing in the world to do. So if you lower taxes, you're shooting yourself in the foot, in my opinion. That doesn't mean we shouldn't help those in the most dire straits. However, we can't apply blanket measures for everyone, thinking that will solve the problem. It's not constructive.
We need to temporarily help those who are the most in need, and, as we said earlier, we need to invest in more constructive things. Otherwise, we'll revert to a government that's more reactive than strategic.