Finance committee  Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to appear. I want to disclose before I present that I have no consulting contracts of any kind anywhere in the world with any corporation or union or NGO or government, and 100% of my income is from Carleton University. I come before this

Finance committee  Yes, but I didn't bring them with me.

Finance committee  I believe it's due to the bank's due diligence.

Finance committee  CMHC is making money. Many people attribute that to the mortgage underwriting policies of CMHC. As a former mortgage manager who's very intimate—

Finance committee  Just by way of answering your question, I only use data that I call “official” data, from OECD, IMF, StatsCan, the U.S. Census Bureau. I'll be very blunt. I don't trust data from NGOs or unions or professors or corporations or politicians.

Finance committee  No disrespect. I only use official data from those official international organizations, such as the OECD, for example. The OECD has studied this in Pensions at a Glance, which they publish every two years, and it is non-partisan. It is funded by Canada and all the other OECD cou

Finance committee  I never advocated the privatization of social housing. I argued that it should never be done by the federal government. Provincial governments are much closer to the people and they should be responsible. Those programs and resources should be transferred. Very quickly on mortga

Finance committee  I'll start with free trade. I'm much more familiar with that. I've been teaching and researching free trade for, literally, 25 years. I'm absolutely mystified by people who don't, after this time, understand the importance of trade to well-being and standard of living. This has

Finance committee  I haven't looked into the details, but you are asking more of a policy-level question. You and the members of Parliament are elected by the citizens of Canada, not by the citizens of some other country around the world. They have their own parliaments and their own representative

Finance committee  It's based on the needs of the Canadian economy in order to make us more competitive, so we can maintain a high standard of living, so that we can continue to afford our social programs and universities and so forth.

Finance committee  I was a candidate once in my life, in the 1993 election in Ottawa Centre against the late Marion Dewar, former mayor of Ottawa, and Mac Harb. I lost decisively and I did not challenge the results.

Finance committee  That was the Progressive Conservative Party, that's right.

Finance committee  That's the kind of thing I am talking about when I say we need to identify gaps, needs, or deficiencies in Canada. Then we use public policy to address those needs. I can't see any other function of the immigration policy. It's not to “save the world”. The United Nations does tha

Finance committee  I think it's extremely appropriate, actually. I actually argued in an op-ed that it should go to 70—not 67—with a provision for those who are in very physically challenging jobs or an exception clause that will allow that. More and more of us are in services. Even though the fi

Finance committee  I am not a member, nor do I contribute to any political party.