Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to both of you for joining us this morning.
I would say, Governor, when someone of your undoubted ability, backed by the highly credible Bank of Canada, goes out on something of an optimistic limb--more so than most, but not all other economists--and tells us that growth will be very substantial next year, first of all, we hope you're right for the sake of the Canadian economy, but naturally we're curious as to your reasoning.
I'd like to ask you two questions on that point. The first is what you might call model risk. I think we all know that these value-at-risk models that banks were using based on maybe 10 years of data failed because 10 years wasn't enough to capture the volatility of recent times. I'm wondering if economic models in general and yours in particular might be subject to the same problem in that if they're based on 20 years of data and the last 20 years have been generally good times, naturally these models assume that when the economy goes down it automatically snaps back nicely, which has been the experience of the last 20 years. But my question is whether the extreme nature of the recent circumstances would lend one to have less faith in such models now than in the past.
My second question is under the general rubric of getting money out the door. We, at least on this side of the table, have considerable concern that, for example, the infrastructure money will not get out the door and that this will therefore provide less of a stimulus than one would think.
And to you in particular, I'd ask about the bank lending, the BDC-EDC in the budget. There is $8 billion, I believe, half a percent of GDP committed to lending by these institutions. If that lending doesn't occur this year when the economy is weak and it sits under a mattress in Ottawa, it doesn't do us any good. So my question is, what would be reasonable? Should we expect this $8 billion, for example, to be fully lent out within 12 months, or what would be a reasonable timeframe for it to be useful in promoting economic recovery?