Thank you, Mr. Adler and Mr. Hoback, for your pre-emptive conclusions for any such study. I guess I take a different point of view. The purpose of the study would in fact not be to start with conclusions and try to prove those conclusions but rather to conduct a study to investigate and find out perhaps new information, hopefully new information that might inform this committee, so that then we could draw conclusions from the fact-based analysis that we would have presented by various experts who would come to the committee.
Given that this is the number one issue identified by Canadians in recent polling, identified by the Governor of the Bank of Canada, the OECD....In fact, the finance minister himself has raised this as a serious concern. One could point, but I won't, to things that the government has done because I think that they made changes in one area around mortgages, but then they changed that direction I think to address the very real concern about growing household debt.
I don't think that household debt is strictly mortgage debt. I think there could be a variety of factors. Households do vary in terms of the nature of their household debt. I think there is a multiplicity of factors and therefore just telling people to reduce their debt is a nice comforting simplistic solution, but it's incumbent on this committee to actually investigate and see what the various causes are.
While I appreciate the time constraints of the committee, I respect the time of the committee. I do feel that between now and the end of December, surely we could find some time to address this important issue.