The working income tax credit was something I skipped over in my talk.
We know, of course, a lot about these kinds of credits because our neighbour to the south has a much bigger program that has been operating since the 1970s. In the United States, that's been the single most important source of poverty reduction, and it's now their biggest welfare program. That's partially because their other programs are so small.
I consider that to be a good short-term solution to the problem of low wages that I raised. It's a bad long-term solution, because we now know one of the side effects of the EITC in the United States is that it encourages the expansion of low-wage jobs. It's a subsidy to low-wage employers in the same way that it's a subsidy to low-wage workers. So by itself, if that's the only thing we do, it really is a band-aid that doesn't stop the bleeding.