Thank you, Chair.
By the way, that report was penned by one of my former colleagues at the Bank of Canada, Paul Masson, so I'm familiar with the work. However, it's only one side of the balance sheet that I carry in my head.
Given the circumstances we found ourselves in, as I discussed in my opening remarks, that of preserving our price-stability target and getting the Canadian economy through the crisis, this was the tool that we had available, the tool of very, very low interest rates. We know that it had the positive effects that we needed at the time, and we also knew well before this paper was put out that it has attendant consequences that accumulate in the longer term. Does "low for long", which is the phrase that we use, give us these risks? The risks that are identified there are absolutely correct. Those are the same risks we've talked about before. We have to ask ourselves if those risks are more, or less, important than the other risks we are offsetting with that policy. So it's a more complex trade-off than is implied by that analysis.
We certainly believe that as the world heals, interest rates will rise as described. That's exactly what we need. But it will be consistent with our inflation target, which is to get around 2%, so that we're back where we belong. For now, this is where we are. We are cognizant of those risks. We don't see evidence of those risks manifesting themselves in a threatening way at this stage, but they will be carefully monitored. That trade-off continues to be made as we go along.