Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
This is a very interesting discussion. I come from British Columbia, of course, and I often find the discussions we have up here in Ottawa don't really relate to how people are feeling on the ground and in communities across the country. The reality is the job figures we talked about earlier in the month of October have been pretty disastrous. We've seen an erosion of good-quality manufacturing jobs--and I know Mr. Stanford's aware of this--and about half a million have been lost over the last few years. There have been only about 200,000 new jobs, even though the labour market has grown to be much larger since May 2008. On average, those new jobs pay about $10,000 less than the jobs they replaced did. A lot of families in my area of the country are really struggling. They're struggling with record debt loads. They're struggling with the increasing income inequality we're seeing in this country.
I want to ask Mr. Stanford and Mr. Seccareccia whether they feel there's a role for monetary policy in addressing some of those issues or whether this is just primarily a fiscal failure, that governments have not put in place the fiscal policies to address all of those issues the middle class are living through.