Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's interesting to see the discussion at that end of the table. I appreciate it.
Many years ago, in the eighties, I was on our local labour council's full employment committee. And from labour's standpoint, if I told an unemployed worker at that time that 3%, 4%, 5% was full employment, I won't say what would have happened, but it wouldn't have been nice. I would suggest that the use of the term “full employment” in that context is a misnomer, because people think full employment should mean everybody capable of working has a job. So there's quite a gap when you think about it. As Mario indicated, we saw the acceptance of 7% and 8% as full employment, which is a real problem.
The other thing that's happening.... I fully accept targeting inflation. I'm one of the people who had a 10.25% rate in 1980 and it went to 21.75% in one jump, so you're not going to get an argument from me.
Kevin Page was before us recently, and he talked about the fact that the government side talks about 600,000 net new jobs. I'm not arguing that point, except that there are still 300,000 fewer people working than pre-recession. The news we just heard today--I think it was from Mr. Stanford--is that some 70,000 have lost their jobs in the latest figures. Well, he was predicting 100,000 for this year. So we've taken out 70,000 of that number already. We've got ourselves a very serious problem right here and right now.
I really wanted to get those points in. As for a question, does inflation targeting limit the Bank of Canada's ability to respond to the global financial crisis?
Mr. Stanford, would you like to take that one? Are there lessons that have been learned from this? Have they changed direction, or is it necessary to?