I do think that coming out of this pandemic, and the longer it is and if there is a resurgence next fall, there's going to be a huge amount of damage to the economy. We're going to have to start thinking about what, in public policies, we could do that would be growth-oriented. We need to be very careful about how we develop our policies.
One thing is that we should not be trying to just pump up consumption. That is not the way to grow the economy. What we're going to have to do is to start building up investments.
I'm not a fan of capital gains exemptions. I'm not going to be going that route myself. I think that certainly, major tax reform, which I think can help for investment and be focused on growth in a very, very diversified way so we're not picking winners and losers amongst industries, can be one type of issue. Regulations are another.
As we knew going into this, we had transportation lock-ups in January and February. We had very poor growth in January. It came out, but nobody really noticed it this week. We need to start thinking more about growth opportunities. Frankly, if we don't get the growth coming back—and I don't think we will, because even coming out of this particular issue, this pandemic, it's going to take some time to relax rules. We're probably going to end up investing more in health capacity, which I think is important. We're already talking about potentially making sure certain essential supplies are available in the country, although you can also do that through something called inventory accumulation. We've spent a lot of money on defence in case of a war against other people, but we can also think about having supplies available for any type of pandemic or epidemic that might hit.
That also costs money. That's going to be a very significant expense for government. Then on top of it, we will have now all of a sudden accumulated a huge amount of gross debt. It has already, at the federal, provincial and municipal levels, reached close to 100%. After this whole situation, if we're running federal and provincial deficits that are in the order of, let's say, 15% to 20% of the economy—I'm not sure if they're going to be that high—we will be pushing our gross debt as a share of GDP up to levels that we haven't seen for over two decades. I think we're going to need to do a lot of repair work, but a lot of it could be addressed through growth, which I think is going to be a major focus for public policy at that time, as will security. That will be another one.