Thank you.
I think what I'm hearing is that all of us want to proceed. I'm looking at this whole chart of different deductions, tax credits, and so on, and they are appealing to the professional, the self-employed, investors, employees, and seniors. Basically, if we go to every tax deduction or tax credit, we will be in trouble.
I think Ms. Minna's idea--and all of you are saying the same thing, actually--is to look at the tax impact on social programs. There are two components you're looking at: the income tax itself, which is the revenue side, and the investment in social programs. If you're looking at both sides, you need experts who have studied budgets to guide us along.
For example, you could ask the Department of Finance about pension adjustment, but if you yourself are not aware of what angles to look at, then we won't be asking the right questions. We need the Department of Finance, but we need to be ready to ask the Department of Finance the right questions. Perhaps we need people to guide us along, people who have taken it as their life's job to look at the whole environment of revenue and social expenditures, and ask what sort of performance indicators are necessary within a department to ensure that it is meeting the agenda.
If I heard correctly from the different witnesses who came, we need a total expenditure framework to get a quantitative idea of what the government's expenditure is doing to women, and so on.
All of us seem to want to go the same route, but we're having a little problem determining whether we should have the cart first or the horse first. The cart seems to be the Department of Finance, and the horse seems to be the experts. So we have to get somebody leading us.
Madame Boucher is first, and then we'll go to Ms. Minna.