We've always been willing to look at the costs and benefits of that strategy. On balance, we have in the past believed, and we continue to believe, that adopting the current currency or adopting the U.S. dollar would not be in Canada's interests.
Frankly, there are two options Mr. Jarislowsky has put forward. One is to try to maintain a band. There are a lot of currency speculators around the world who got rich taking advantage of governments or central banks trying to prop up bands. George Soros springs to mind, in the U.K.
The other possibility is simply to adopt the U.S. dollar, which would give up all control of monetary policy in this country. We're not Europe. We're not going to get a significant say in U.S. monetary policy if we adopt their currency.
What you really have to look at, whether we're looking at short-term problems--the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and so on, going on in the United States, and the impact that may have on U.S. inflation and U.S. interest rates--or the long-term impact of these huge U.S. deficits on the government side, the fragility of their social security system and what's going to come out of that in terms of U.S. inflation rates down the road, and therefore U.S. interest rates.... When we look at the U.S. doing all the things wrong that we did wrong in the nineties and fixed...do we really want to pay the price for that by paying U.S. interest rates, by hooking our currency to that over the long term?