In my minute then, yes, the speech on “Living with Lower for Longer” talked about our estimate that the Canadian economy can aspire to a long-term trend growth rate of about 1.5% for the foreseeable future. That's our estimate of growth potential.
The whole world has slowed down because of slower demographics. We're not excepted from that, and the U.S. is only slightly higher at 1.7%, with a slightly younger population.
It's 1.5%, and in that context, what is it that we can do to make the trend line higher? We can remove some of the impediments to growth, which are structural things. These are not things that monetary policy is equipped to do much or anything about. Indeed, in the narrow sense, neither is fiscal policy.
By structural things we mean deficient infrastructure, which, of course, would mean providing better infrastructure, but it can be other things such as interprovincial free trade and free trade internationally. These are things that, when changed, can boost that growth rate by 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.3%, and pretty soon you're rounding up to 2.0% instead of 1.5%. That's what I was talking about there, and we have control over many of those policies.
Of course, the one that's happening right now is the infrastructure plan, which will be welcomed by firms. That helps them grow their business. Turning to labour supply, productivity, competitiveness, and the debt-to-income ratio, over to you, Ms. Wilkins.