Yes, it's normal for government leaders to make rosy predictions, and when they don't come true, to blame them on exterior factors in faraway lands.
I'm looking at your comments from the monetary policy update, Mr. Governor, and you attributed some of the downgrade to a structural matter, which was global oil prices. You compared oil prices to where they were five years ago. Of course, when you compare anything to a peak, you're going to be down, but it turns out oil prices are not low right now. Oil prices are actually quite high by historical standards. If you convert them into Canadian dollars, they're almost average for the last roughly 35 to 40 years. From 1980 on, we had an incredible expansion of Canada's oil sector at those average, inflation-adjusted prices.
What you didn't say in this remark—which astonished me and I'm sure many others—is that it has nothing to do with global oil prices, which are high. It has to do with reaching the market. I know it would have been politically inconvenient for the government if you had pointed out that market access, and not global oil prices, is the problem. Given that your job is not to help the government but to assess the facts, why did you attribute it to global oil prices rather than market access, which everyone agrees is the real problem?