We certainly welcome broader efforts to improve financial literacy. We play a modest role in that, or we try to play a role in that, through our outreach efforts, through our website, and through our museum. We're going to continue to enhance our explanations of how the economy works, how money works, and elements that I think would be consistent and broadly supportive of this effort.
When explaining these things to youth or any age group of Canadians, part of the issue is that sometimes we all take the recent past as indicative of the future. As you know, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, which is why we focus so much on the economy and achieving our inflation target, and we keep working at that. We don't take it for granted.
In terms of this issue and the household debt issue, one of the great risks in the current environment is that Canadians take low interest rates—very low, extremely low, historically low interest rates—for granted. They construct their financial affairs with very long-term liability, such as a mortgage, on the expectation that interest rates will basically stay at these levels over the life of that mortgage. What we have tried to counsel is the very basic point that, in taking on a longer-term debt, people should look at their ability to service it at a more normal rate of interest. We supply on our website all the rates of interest going back through the last decade, the nineties, the eighties, and back to Confederation, so the Canadians can make their own judgments about what normal is—but it's considerably higher than where rates are today.
That's a very basic important fact. The other basic fact for younger Canadians is the benefit of compounding, even at low rates of interest, and the value of starting some element of savings early on, particularly in a society where the vast majority of Canadians are saving for their own retirement. If you start early and build over time, even in periods like the present when there is extreme volatility in markets, the value of compounding will overcome that volatility over the lifetime of your building up a nest egg for a home, for retirement, or for your children's education.
If I may, Mr. Chair, I would say the final thing is that there are a variety of programs and tax advantage programs to enhance savings for Canadians. Just being aware of those programs and using them is incredibly important.