I think you are absolutely right. Most of what has occurred in the last almost decade has occurred through the tax system, but there has been very little initiative on the spending side. In that sense, I am apolitical because we have done now, for almost 15 years, an exercise in how to jigger around with the tax system instead of how to invest in the next generation.
I'm not kidding when I say we have run the course on tax cuts. We cannot continue to strip the cupboard. We have more economic prowess today than we have had since the 1960s, and now we're pleading that the cupboard is bare. Meanwhile, cities are crumbling. We are not dealing with climate change. We're not dealing with growing inequality. Yet the fiscal resources are there. It is time to stop the tax cut agenda. I don't care which party starts that process. It is time to call a spade a spade. What is happening at the city level is people know it's either raising taxes or cutting services. Canadians do not want less service. They want more service and they want better service, and that is the equation.
I think it is a political discourse whose time has come. The pendulum has swung as far as it can. You are absolutely right. The difficulty with doing gender analysis on that front is it is very easy to do an incidence study on who gets the benefits of a tax cut because it's dollars and cents.
You cannot measure the benefit of a social spending dollar because it is not just what happens this year, it's what happens over the course of a person's life. So how do you capture the return on that investment? It's a very messy project. It's easier to do a tax cut and say, “Look, we gave you the money”, and then you can do a gender analysis and say, “Well, guys have more money than girls”, but in fact the spending has so many multiplier effects and it has such a long yield curve that it is extraordinarily difficult to say, “This is a better use for your dollar than the tax cut”. It is a job that needs to be done, and somebody needs to start doing it.