Thank you, Chair, and thank you, witnesses.
You know that they say there are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics. I'm looking at the second page of your presentation, Mr. Macklem. It says here that the banks provided 13.2% above the level of one year earlier; for business lending by financial institutions, it's up 11.5%; banks' traditional business is up 11.2%; household lending is up 10.7%; total consumer credit is up 9.1%. You look at that and ask, well, what's the problem? Yet simultaneously you're shovelling money over to Mr. Halde to the point that he has a gag reaction. He can barely get the money out the door quickly enough.
We know that's not true anecdotally, because every one of us around here has heard from constituents who tell us that the banks are choking off credit. Mr. Halde's bank is generally regarded as the lender of last resort. So those three paragraphs don't live in the same universe with what we know to be anecdotally true and what we suspect is actually true.
Can you give us a reconciliation between the bank's propaganda line and what appears to be the reality?