I'd just like to say if I can be of any service--and I imagine my colleagues feel the same way--it would be an honour to work in any capacity with a committee that has been as dedicated as this committee has been.
I want to go to Madam Neville's question of the deputy minister, which was, can you substantiate these claims? The claim was that these measures had greater productivity. And then, what data was used for the assessment that the GST cut benefited lower-income women? These are important questions to ask, which you don't need us to answer. You need the Department of Finance and you need this committee to ask those questions constantly: are you sure this is helping the people you claim are being helped?
But quite apart from saying, can you substantiate your claims, because dimes to doughnuts they'll come back substantiating their claims, what you really want to know is, in the sum total of measures that have occurred, what has been targeted to the bottom half of the income distribution, the bottom 20% of the income distribution for women versus men, versus the top?
Ask the question you want to see. If you think it's not more progressive, don't ask them to substantiate what they've already said. Ask them to show by a measure that this is the distribution and this is the incidence by income tax bracket for men and women, or by income class for men and women, of how these different things stack up.
In their analysis here, in some line items they'll say what the fiscal impact is and in other line items they won't say what the fiscal impact is. Consistency would be a great step forward--consistency in having the fiscal impact and in having who benefited from this from what our data show us. And if you can't show who's benefiting, then explain to us on what basis you're moving it forward.
But again, I just think the role of this committee is to get greater clarity and to lift the veil on government initiatives. Sometimes the people who sit on the government side can do this and sometimes they can't, but that's the purpose of this committee, to lift the veil.