Finance committee  Yes, but the experiment you're describing is a little bit artificial because it's a global bond market. If it did happen the way you described it, it would normally be because inflation in country A went up and therefore all of its bond yields went up, and that would for sure pass right through to mortgages.

Finance committee  It could, and certainly I could create a model in which to do an experiment like that. When we talk about government crowding out private spending, it usually has that mechanism.

Finance committee  That's the debt service ratio for households. We did some nice charts on this, not in this MPR but in the previous one, back in July. We did an experiment on the various segments of the household sector, depending on how much debt they were carrying relative to their income, in each category.

Finance committee  We have three measures of core inflation, and they use various techniques to remove the noise from the regular headline inflation rate, but the official target is for the headline inflation rate.

Finance committee  The CPI is the one, but of course, often we have these big fluctuations that we need to explain and then say that we're going to see through that fluctuation. It would be like the tail wagging the dog to respond to each fluctuation.

Finance committee  It's very modest. In the CPI, the residential costs have rent and all sorts of blended stuff in there, and it's a very slow process.

Finance committee  They don't need to take the stress test again, unless they're changing lenders. If they're renewing their mortgage, there's no stress test.

Finance committee  As I answered before, I think bankers are smart enough to know that if they were somehow charging people more in that instance, everybody would hear about it. That would not be a good business practice.

Finance committee  That is a very complicated question. That's why you would get more than one answer from different people. I won't give you some bottom-line judgment on that, but I'll try to explain it. When we have a tariff—say, the United States puts on tariffs and then Canada puts on a countervailing tariff—what that does is raise the price on both sides of the border.

Finance committee  I'm sorry. I must disagree with that, because we were not at any point trying to stop prices from rising by doing this. We were trying to improve the quality of household debt. Other policies were put in place to try to control house price rises. Supply would have affected that, but it would not have changed the affordability.

Finance committee  We have not analyzed that particular thing in any detail. We do have in our forecast a factor taken into account because of the differential between those two tax treatments in Canada and the U.S. It is one of the reasons why our investment profile in our forecast is less than it would be according to our normal modelling.

Finance committee  The fact is that, as we said, when B-20 was put in place, we put in our monetary policy report estimates on how much of an effect that would have. It's not zero. It would have a slowdown effect in the housing market, because of course it acts very similarly to an interest rate hike in the system.

Finance committee  If they failed the stress test, it means they would have problems over the next two, three or four years. If they managed to get that mortgage, they would have trouble affording it as interest rates rose, which we all know is—

Finance committee  It's a popular question. I'd like to give a different answer each time to keep people interested. I think trade actions.... And I call them “actions" with purpose; they're much more than trade tensions. When concrete actions have been taken, we're shooting with live ammo. It is having effects on economies—not just China and the United States, but other bystanders are being affected.

Finance committee  This is a matter of getting the right match. Canada is a big place. Other countries, such as Germany, seem to do a better job, but it's usually because most jobs are within a two-hour commute, and we don't have that situation here. Skills mismatching is often portrayed as gigantic, that the job growth is in the digital economy space and the job losses are in manufacturing, let's say.