You want to explore the worst-case scenario. Let's talk about that.
First of all, as I've said a couple of times, the centrepiece of the policy response is fiscal and the most important tools in the fiscal response are what I call “elastic” tools. They will grow automatically if the shock lasts longer. I would think you'd best put that question to the finance minister. I know you're meeting with him a bit later.
I'll put it this way: In terms of the level of federal government debt from where we sit at just over 30% of the Canadian economy, imagine a household that has had a mortgage for some time and they owe 30% of their income on their mortgage. They say, “We've been in this house for 12 years now. Let's put an addition on the back. We can have a bigger kitchen and we'll make it nicer.” They go to the bank and they have to borrow about 10% of their income to do this project, so their mortgage goes from 30% of their income to 40% of their income. Then they have a nicer house, they do their thing and a number of years later they've paid it back. This is roughly the experiment that we are talking about in fiscal space. It could be as much as, let's say, if it was a bad scenario, 10% of GDP that the federal government needs to borrow and then pay off over a period of time at extraordinarily low interest rates. I don't think it's much different from what an ordinary household has done at some time in their lives.
In that sense, again, from there on, ask the finance minister what he thinks about that.
I'm getting the signal from the chair, but I want to say that the Bank of Canada policy is to provide the type of market support where that can all occur. If we are in a period of worst-case scenario as you describe, it would be a very uncertain time. Those tensions that we've been seeing in markets would persist and we would continue to do our thing.
As I've said to people, those tools can be used essentially without limit in order to sustain that market performance. Those large-scale asset purchases can be on a much bigger scale than what we're proposing to do at this point, and if that's what they had to be, that's what they would have to be. That would give us good market performance, we would get the job done, and then, of course, over time, whatever period of time the fiscal authority decided, we would pay that money back.