Thank you.
Thank you for being with us today, Mr. Carney.
I would like to come back to the point Ms. Nash started to address: budget austerity. If we look at some countries, Great Britain for example, that have moved fairly aggressively toward budget austerity, we see that they seem to be having a lot of problems with economic growth at present. In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund questioned the multiplier it currently uses to study budgetary effects, and in particular effects associated with budget austerity.
Here in Canada, you probably know that the Parliamentary Budget Officer, using the Department of Finance multipliers, concluded that Canada is not currently realizing its full economic potential. Among other things, he concluded that growth is 1% lower than what it could be if we did not take the austerity approach, and that we have a loss of about 125,000 new jobs.
As things now stand, and in the global climate of economic uncertainty we are experiencing, do you think austerity is the direction we should be going in? Should we not instead examine other alternatives, such as stimulating the economy with infrastructure work, which would provide an injection of sufficient funds to help growth?