Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Giroux, I want to respectfully circle back to a couple of the statements you made earlier.
One is with respect to this increased debt, $252 billion, not affecting the draw on the operating budget. My understanding is that pre-COVID debt is locked in for a long period of time and that those interest rates are set. Certainly adding more debt, and you said it was counterintuitive, must add more interest costs to be drawn against the operating budget.
In addition to that you also said—and I think I heard you correctly a moment ago—that you thought it was unlikely that interest rates would rise.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to question the governor of the Bank of Canada, Mr. Poloz, on this very question. It's on the record that he said interest rates will most certainly rise once we come out of this. He thought that would be a good problem to have, from a Bank of Canada perspective, if there's inflation. Increasing interest rates would be a tool for him to use. He did say that, so I think we can't assume interest rates are going to stay low after we come out of this. Trillions of dollars in quantitative easing are going on across the world.
Assuming we're in that position, will the Liberals have to adopt a program of austerity and start cutting their budgets, as they did in 1990, or are they going to have to start increasing taxes, or a combination of those things?