When Chancellor Merkel visited Canada this summer, she made it very clear that Canada is on the right track in controlling expenditures. Germany has done so and Germany has avoided a lot of the difficulties that other countries have experienced in Europe and has maintained quite a strong manufacturing base in their country.
I know you've run businesses. I know you're busy here in Ottawa now so you're not there all the time. However, you can't run a business, you can't run a household, you can't run a country by running into debt year after year and pulling out the credit card every time there's a problem and adding on to your debt load. It eventually catches up with you. It catches up especially when interest rates go up, and they inevitably will go up, which is why we've been saying that, and I've been saying, and the governor has been saying that about our housing residential mortgage situation.
We all have to make sure that we stay on track to balance budgets, that we keep the Toronto commitments. The Prime Minister showed a great deal of leadership on that in pushing that forward at Toronto and in the G-20. I think we all need to get on that course. Really, there's not a lot of push back that I hear at the meetings from some of the countries that are in difficulty, but there has to be the will to follow through and to implement, which is always challenging.
Ireland, for example, is following through and is going to be successful, in my view, in their austerity measures, at the same time as promoting economic growth in the country, and they will recover.