Thank you very much.
My question is for Mr. Cross. Mr. Cross, as we come out of this, I think the finance committee has to be thinking deeply about the economic recovery, the very painful, long economic recovery that will follow this massive supply shock. Yet with the ongoing conversation about stimulus, many believe and are arguing that we can just continue to permanently spend, borrow dollars to eventually stimulate the economy back to life.
There seems to be confusion between producing wealth and consuming wealth. It's true that when governments spend money, for example, propping up a failing business, there is economic activity; it's a consumption of wealth. When a profitable, self-sustaining business generates activity by selling products and services to people who want them, it produces wealth. The example that you and, I think, the concerned manufacturers gave was the massive subsidies for windmills and solar panels in Ontario, $30 billion or $40 billion. They did create economic activity in the sense of consuming those tens of billions of dollars. Then the businesses that had to pay the price had to lay off workers and shut down operations or move out of the country.
If a solar panel company got $100 in revenue, $90 of it was in subsidies and $10 was actually the value generated. If we run an economy that way, we're just going to bankrupt ourselves by consuming what we don't produce.
Can you help explain the difference between the production of wealth and the consumption of wealth?