Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
My question will be directed to Mr. Robson, but first I want to make sure that something else is on the record around the budget. I don't want Canadians who might be listening to think that there's been a deliberate attempt by our government to not be transparent or accountable. Last year we actually announced a budget date. That was Monday, March 30. We didn't follow through with it, because there was a massive pandemic, and that had to be sidelined.
I also want to remind everyone that we did have reports every two weeks, once we started up with the finance committee, to make sure we were transparent and accountable with our spending. It took part right up until the end of August, when we prorogued. When we came back into session, then we were accountable through our Parliament. There also is an intention to be presenting a budget. I don't want people to think that's not coming—it is—or that we haven't been accountable and transparent.
Mr. Robson, in your opinion, how should the federal government have spent or financed emergency and economic restart programs? We have heard time and time again from many economists that if we hadn't spent what we did, our economy would have been much worse. We also have really good data to show that we're actually doing fairly well, considering. When we look at our labour participation rates, we are doing better than Germany, the U.S. and Japan. When we look at the fourth quarter of Canada's GDP growth, we grew more than the U.K., the U.S., Germany, France and Italy.
If you are worried about our debt levels, how would you have done things differently?