Thank you, Mr. Page, for your presentation.
I echo Mr. Menzies' comments that it behoves us all to be fairly humble about projections these days. I had the Library of Parliament run what the economists said in January of 2008 versus what actually happened over the course of 2008, and in the last quarter the variation was between a 4% and 5% error. That's an enormous amount of money, $50 billion to $60 billion or so.
The whole concept of stimulus is all the rage these days. It seems to me that all kinds of things get dumped into the idea of stimulus. There seems to be real stimulus and then there seems to be faux stimulus. There's a ranking for the productivity of a tax relief--generally corporate, goes to personal, goes to consumption--in terms of its multiplier effects for the economy. Is there a similar ranking, agreed upon among economists, as to the quality of stimulative effects and how they compare--for instance, the stimulative effect of tax relief versus other forms of what is being called stimulant?
So just as a general question, are all the things that are called stimulus in fact stimulative to the economy?