Well, why don't I speak to our forecast, what's happening right now?
I have 32 guys back at the shop who model everything in the country, and we do our forecasts on a quarterly cycle. What we're seeing happen right now in the economy is a very sharp impact on investment. We're now heading into a period where Canada could have a worse quarter than the United States by a lot. I won't put a number on it, but certainly a contraction of more than 5% in the first quarter is going to be in our forecast. That naturally will lead us to mark down our growth forecast for the whole year.
Like Don, I don't know whether we're in deflation or not. We see a little bit of inflation, so there could be nominal income growth in the economy. But certainly, having the economy contract by, let's say, about 2% over the course of this year--we'll finalize the number in the next 10 days--is going to have an impact on government revenues and will make the deficit a little bit deeper.
Now, of course, we can afford it. All the writing I did over the course of the last two months has been to explain to Canadians the fact that having a debt-to-GDP ratio at 30% means you can provide stimulus for, let's say, two years. That's quite affordable going forward. The challenge will be when we get back to growth. Are we going to get back to balanced budgets fast enough? That's the challenge this committee is going to grapple with two to three years down the road.