Thank you, Mr. Giroux and Dr. Yan, for your testimony today.
Your testimony is staggering to me when I hear all the numbers, as I'm sure it is for all my colleagues on the committee here today. What I heard with interest and more importantly is what Canadians would be going through had the government not stepped in and had not taken these drastic measures and continued to address this. If we had not done it, I shudder to think of where our economy would be headed and where Canadians would be at this point.
I'm going to be sticking to the analogy of World War II, because it's the first time we've faced a crisis such as this since World War II. At the time, we mobilized the entire nation and the economy and we won, but we ran deficits of approximately 20% of GDP for about five years. When the war ended, the economy kept growing and we were into surpluses two years later. Is there any reason for you to think that if we continue in the short term with deficits of 15% to 20% of GDP we cannot come out of this stronger post-COVID-19?