I'll go back to you, Mr. Alexander. I was looking at the Conference Board of Canada's fall outlook that was put out not too long ago. It has a bunch of details about what the Conference Board predicts will happen to the economy and raises the point of record high consumer debt in Canada. It also says that this debt has been sustaining a lot of the growth that we've been seeing in Canada.
The government is running a huge deficit and has a massive debt that it's servicing every single year. Most of the provinces are in the same boat. We're spending money we don't have.
I'm guilty, just like all our consumers, of running up the debt in my household. I try to do my best to pay it down over time, but I'm also not a massive national economy. I know that it does happen. There is such a thing as debt that you need to have, especially when your wife tells you so.
For a national economy, this is sustaining a lot of the growth we're seeing throughout Canada. I know that back home in my province of Alberta, a lot of families are still hurting from the downturn in the price of oil, which was one portion of it. Then there are also a whole bunch of bad tax decisions and bad decisions on energy policy, and there are the LMRs, the ratings, for small and medium-sized businesses that are in oil and gas back home.
How much risk is there to the national budget that consumer spending will actually deflate or weaken much more than even what you're predicting here? How much of an impact would it have?