Thank you for the question. I'll try to do this in 30 or 45 seconds.
We were in Australia at an APEC meeting—the finance ministers—and we were all concerned about too much cash sloshing around the world. This was in July 2007. In August 2007 I was at home on a Sunday afternoon and Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson called me and said, “Well, now we know where the problem is: subprime mortgages in the United States.” He said, “That's the bad news. The good news is that we know where the problem is.” I went down to the kitchen and said to Christine, “I'm going back to Ottawa.”
And we have been struggling with this ever since, first the credit crisis, and then the crisis in the real economy. You know from your own business background how difficult things became for small and medium-sized businesses in Canada. In any event, we dealt with it, and in a fairly dramatic way. I still think it was a great day for Canada when the opposition parties recognized the seriousness of the economic situation, which they did. I recognize them for recognizing that when it really mattered—except for Scott.