Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond to that excellent summary of the points I made.
The member will remember that I was very careful to say, since I am now a politician and not an academic, that this is indeed what scholars around the world, scholars who are published by the OECD are finding. They are finding that there is a trade-off for societies, a trade-off on the generosity of programs of the sort he mentioned and the unemployment rate.
My point is that what this country has to come to grips with is however much we would like to fly by flapping our wings, we are never going to fly. There are certain realities in this world. In this case the reality is that we cannot have it both ways: more generous programs than other countries and the same rate of unemployment. I do not know if it has ever been explained to the people of Canada what the trade off is and what they would choose if they really had been given the alternative by the government. We should at least start a dialogue.
I think I know where we will end up but since I believe in democracy that would be up to the people. The main thing we have to do is start a dialogue on that subject.