To answer your question, I would say that the situation is not exactly temporary in the sense that, for a decade, Canadian businesses have been making more profits than they have been investing. You might say that businesses have been lending money to households for a decade whereas normally you would expect households to be lending money to the businesses.
As for the manufacturing sector, I'm going to go back to the subject of free trade that was mentioned just now. In my view, free trade is a good thing when we have full employment but not necessarily a good thing when we don't. In fact, it has led to the inequities we were discussing earlier.
Here is one suggestion for increasing productivity in Canada—a matter that government MPs should be very interested in. It seems to me that, if real wages were raised, the minimum wage, that is, it would force businesses to be more productive in order to preserve their profits.