I'll give two themes to the response: First, yes, we can afford this; second, we cannot afford not to. There is a cost to everything, including inaction, and perhaps I'll start there.
The absence of serious and substantial federal government intervention in the present circumstances had the potential to lead to a widespread collapse of households and businesses in communities from coast to coast to coast. If you can imagine what it would be like if houses were being foreclosed upon, businesses were being shut down and people didn't have a workplace to return to at the end of this public health emergency, the cost would hardly be able to be measured in dollars.
Conversely, the cost of the action we've taken can be measured. I've mentioned the magnitude of some of the measures we've implemented to date. The PBO report points out where the cost could go. He also noted in his report that Canada is positioned well to respond to a challenge such as this and will remain in a position to continue to respond should the need demand it.
One of the reasons we're in a particularly healthy fiscal position that enables us to use the firepower we've set aside for a crisis such as this is that, going into this crisis, Canada actually had the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio of any G7 economy. We were coming in at our lowest rate of unemployment and our highest job rate, and frankly, the lowest poverty rate we've had since we started keeping track of those statistics more than 40 years ago.
During his testimony at this committee just a few weeks ago, the governor of the Bank of Canada likened our economy to that of an Olympic athlete, I think it was, who was dealing with this virus, and saying that someone who is that fit is more likely to come out of this virus in better shape than a person who has a pre-existing respiratory illness.
Because of our healthy fiscal position heading into this crisis, Canada is able to offer a world-class response in both magnitude and timeliness, and I dare say that the cost of inaction would greatly outweigh the cost of responding in the manner in which you've seen the government take action in the past few weeks.