There are two or three questions in there.
I know that there are some people who think that deficits and national debt are bad. I simply don't subscribe to that. I think there's a very substantial body of economic theory that would argue against that. It's not the idea that there is a national debt or a deficit; it's partly whether there's a need for it. Right now, there's no need for it.
To deal with your larger question, when you are not running up surpluses, again, it's not about paying off the deficit or being very ideological, if you will, about paying off the deficit or the debt; it's that you are reducing your degrees of freedom for the future. That's my biggest argument that I want to make to parliamentarians today. You may think that this is free of consequence, but it isn't, because what we're doing is reducing our degrees of freedom in the future when—who knows?—we have to bail out the next automobile company in the next recession.
I'll say very quickly that this is the second-longest recovery in economic history in Canada and the United States. We are already on statistical borrowed time, if you will, before the next recession. When it comes, we're going to have to stimulate. It could be 2% of GDP or it might be 3% of GDP, but it's going to be very significant, because there's an expectation that governments have to do something. Then we're going to be looking at $20-billion deficits like they were nothing. We're probably going to be looking at deficits of $50 billion, $60 billion or $70 billion in the next recession. Again, then along comes the problem with the maritime provinces that are the most challenged, so we have some crises down the road. Also, tax revenues are going to start to fall as the growth rates start to decline because the boomers are all heading off into the sunset.
The economy of today and the growth of today are not going to be there in two, three or four years. We are facing a structural transformation over the next five or 10, 15, 20 or 30 years, but we're spending like there are not going to be any changes occurring.