If you think we're facing a wave of mortgage failures—and we are—the wave of debt that is going to be coming at us can't be ducked, nor can the wave of insolvency for businesses and households. That is going to happen, so the question is simple: Who holds the debt?
As I said in my opening statement, based on what the Parliamentary Budget Officer has estimated, the hole that the pandemic blew into the economy is $288 billion. Federal spending is going the whole nine yards. We don't know if all of it will get spent, in particular with the wage subsidy, but all of the different forms of help total up to $146 billion, so less than half of the hole. Without this, the hole would have been twice as big and more people would have lost their homes, more rapidly. People would not have stayed at home. We would have been unable to contain the contagion.
As I said in my comments, it isn't good enough to just talk about what would have been. I think nobody in this virtual room is arguing that the feds should not have done what they did. If some were arguing that it should not happen, that's a really marginal thought to the community of economic thought. Almost everybody agrees that they had to act and had to act fast.
My point is that it's not time to cut spending and worry about federal debt, because there other forms of debt, which Mr. Poilievre, Dr. Mintz and Dr. Cross have all acknowledged. There's one flow of income to deal with household debt, business debt and government debt. Government comes in three flavours: federal, provincial and territorial, and municipal. Everybody is going to have more debt, and the cheapest debt to be held is at the federal level. It's okay if that debt goes up. In fact, that's the smartest way to reduce costs for debt servicing.
I don't know what else I can add. I said all of these things before.
You were also asking about benefits of spending. If we do not spend on child care, if we do not ensure that critical infrastructure is in place so that people can get back to work.... As I have said a hundred times before, given how many women lost their jobs and that they are half the workforce, if they don't get back into the economy, we cannot recover. We cannot recover our purchasing power, which is 56% of the economy.
We know that the United States is poised to lose half of its ecosystem of child care. If we do not support this critical infrastructure, there will be no recovery because there will be no “she-covery”, and there will be no “she-covery” because there's no child care. That's math. That's just plain math.