Thank you.
There is no free lunch. Every dollar you spend means money that's going to have to be recouped through increased taxes or through the destruction of savings by inflation. There's no free lunch.
I was born in 1950 in Canada. I have lived here all my life. I studied hard. I have three degrees in science from Toronto and Queen's. I've worked hard. I'm a conserver. I've lived frugally. I have a 14-year-old daughter and I'm not quite sure what to tell her now. The path now taken by all levels of government in Canada is unsustainable. It is unsustainable economically, it is unsustainable socially, and it's unsustainable environmentally.
My first recommendation is: you need to balance the budget. No deficit. No off-the-book deficits. No unfunded liabilities.
I'm 59 years old. In my lifetime, you gentlemen have destroyed the value of our currency by a factor of about 20. I've given you the example here of a postage stamp from 1966. I was 16 then, and five cents got you a letter then. Today it's 54 cents, an increase by a factor of 10. It's the same thing for a candy bar. It cost a nickel when I was a kid, but now it's a buck.
If you look at the coinage, you've debased our currency. The first coin I show here is from 1967. That coin was 80% silver. It's worth about two and a half bucks in today's money. By the end of 1967 it was down to 50% silver. In 1969 it was made of nickel, and then at the turn of the millennium you converted it to iron with nickel plating. You have debased our currency. I've seen it debased four times during my lifetime.
You carry a huge debt and you're adding to the debt. I guess I'm different from most of your other presenters, who are asking for more spending, more deficits, and more debt at all levels of government. I showed you the Canadian stamps and the Canadian coins. The other stamps there are German. Germany had some fairly significant inflation. The cost of stamps went from 20 marks in 1920 to 100,000 marks in 1922, and then the cost went to 50 billion marks to mail a letter in 1923. We're heading the same way, gentlemen. With that destruction of the currency, Germany removed its debts; they were inflated to nothing. It destroyed social stability and it brought in Hitler.
There is no complexity. The only way to spend more than is being earned is to inflate the currency. That is neither stable nor sustainable. There is not a trade-off between economics and social and environmental stability. Without economic stability, you will not have social stability. You cannot defend the weak if you have no financial abilities. You cannot protect the environment. You need to balance the budget: no deficit, no off-the-book deficits, no accounting games, no unfunded liabilities.
Where you're going to spend, you need to spend productively. That means accountability. You need to show that what you're spending actually generates some wealth. I heard a lot about IRAP and other things. After spending 40 years in science, I'm telling you that you need to show that you're actually getting something back, because a lot of it doesn't come back. You need to rebuild the tax system so it's fair, and seen to be fair. Simplify, simplify, and simplify.
There are a bunch of examples there. No deficits; accountability for all spending; a simplified fair tax system. No free lunch.
Thank you.