Finance committee  Yes, it's true. We've talked about this for a long time, because it was one of the characteristics of a return home that we felt was central. During the post-crisis period, with really low interest rates, quite naturally it was housing and consumption that did most of the growing, and businesses demonstrated a reluctance to invest, given the uncertainty about the economic outlook.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  It plays a role, but to put numbers beside that wouldn't be an easy thing. Diversifying our markets is not the base issue. The base issue that we're talking about here is that a number of our commodities.... As you mentioned, WCS is obviously trading at a very low level right now, but so are a number of other exports, mostly metals.

Finance committee  There's no question that affordability varies a great deal across the regions. Therefore, we get really high mortgage debt in places where houses are more expensive, especially Vancouver, but Toronto was following in Vancouver's footsteps two years ago. At that time, we had a very strong speculative element running through both markets: bidding wars, prices rising, multiple people bidding on a thing and the price going up enormously.

Finance committee  It may be a question to put to the banks or the financial institutions more generally, I should say. I haven't been picking up complaints of that sort. I think any bank would realize that if they were treating a customer as trapped it would instantly be known. I don't think it's a great strategy for any bank to follow.

Finance committee  Why don't you take this?

Finance committee  Certainly, the Canadian economy cannot sustain itself without a great deal of foreign trade. It's a question of scale. You need to have a certain amount of scale in the production in order to get the efficiency that makes you competitive in the international markets. NAFTA, as we used to call it—now the USMCA—was a very important building block for our economy.

Finance committee  This is research that is actually quite global in nature. In fact, our counterparts at the Federal Reserve in the United States also believe that their neutral range is the same—2.5% to 3.5%. This is a number that is ground out of the global saving-investment balance, and the use of funds and the provision of funds in financial markets.

Finance committee  Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and committee members. Senior deputy governor Wilkins and I are pleased to be with you today to discuss the bank's monetary policy report. Last April, we talked about the considerable economic progress that we had seen. We explained that, after a lacklustre start to 2018, growth would rebound in the second quarter, coming in at around 2% for the rest of the year.

Finance committee  As you know, the inflation rate tends to be very variable. It's influenced by many short-term things. We're always looking for a better way to filter out those variations, especially since, as a policy-maker, I know that we can only affect inflation 18 months to two years from now.

Finance committee  My perception is that demand for housing remains very strong, throughout Canada, actually, not just in those markets, and therefore, the pace of construction and the jobs in construction are basically determined by the demand. The supply is the constraint that prevents it from being faster.

Finance committee  Those are a lot of interesting questions. Companies are telling us is that the vast majority of vacancies are for skilled workers, and it's the lack of supply of workers with the appropriate skills that is causing that to be the case. As I said before, it's possible that it can be a geographic imbalance.

Finance committee  I think skilled trade workers have specialty skills too, and so you often may need certification of some kind. If you're an immigrant who may be a qualified carpenter and you don't have a paper for Canada, you might have to go to community college for a refresher and get your certificate, or go through an apprenticeship.

Finance committee  It was very strong in the fourth quarter. What happened is that at the end of the year a number of significant projects in the energy sector reached their natural conclusion. So you have a bulge in spending, which of course only began, I'd say, two years ago, after the oil shock kind of got behind us.

Finance committee  When I used the word “experiment,” I was calling these policies a sort of experiment because no one really knew how they would turn out—putting a tax on foreign buyers and that sort of thing. There have been other cases around the world where the same thing has been done and it has had only temporary effects.