Let me respond to that.
Clearly the debt situation in Canada has deteriorated--I'm talking about personal debt now--over the past two to three years, reflecting the fact that monetary policy was very effective. That's one of the reasons Canada was able to outperform....
However, you can talk about debt and you can talk about the quality of debt; namely, not all debt is created equal. If you look at the U.S., the debt-to-income ratio was more or less the same, but 33% of the mortgage market there was made up of sub-prime mortgages, as opposed to the situation in Canada, where it is less than 5%.
I'll give you another number: only 4.1% of households in Canada have less than 20% equity in their house and a debt-to-service ratio of more than 40%. So there's debt and there's quality of debt.
I will be the first to admit that the debt situation in Canada is unsustainable, and we have to see some de-leveraging happening. We have to see the savings rate rising and we have to see credit going down, and it's starting.
The question is to what extent the government should do something about it. My advice is that at this point it should do nothing, because the economy's already slowing. The market is taking care of itself.
If you look at the housing market in Canada, it is already slowing down. House prices are falling. Mortgage activity is slowing down. Consumer credit is back to the levels we have seen in the recession in terms of a month-over-month rate of growth. So the market is already clearing.
I totally agree that the debt situation is a problem. This is not the time to deal with it. A year or two years from now, if we see a rebound in credit and the housing market starting to rise again, that will be the time to take care of it.
At this point, don't fight the momentum. The momentum is helping us now.