There is a lot to be said about the intergenerational impacts of what has happened. COVID has been very hard on young people. It has interrupted their schooling. Those who are graduating into the labour market currently are facing a rough time. There are many other things to be concerned about in addition to the question of when we are going to pay down the cost of this pandemic.
I know that there are arguments for spreading it out over a very long period of time. My own inclination would be to try to get the people who benefited directly, including from the transfer payments, to shoulder some of that cost in the near term, partly because other things are going to happen in the future. We have now begun to think perhaps these extraordinary events come along a little more frequently than we used to think they did.
It is very common for people to talk about the very good fiscal position Canada was in going into this crisis. That naturally followed from the prudent fiscal policy in the past. I think it would make sense for current governments to think similarly about what kind of legacy they're going to leave, because there will be additional problems in the future and you'd like future governments to also be able to say “we were in good fiscal shape when we went into that”.
On the particular point I was making about how much you pay per dollar of program spending, I think what I might do in response to the question is observe that the numbers I'm talking about will be different depending on the level of interest rates and the level of growth rates. You can run a deficit consistent with a steady debt-to-GDP ratio if you are persuaded that it's a good guidepost. I'm not a big fan myself, but it makes sense. It's sustainable.
No matter what variation on that you choose, at some point the tax cost of a program dollar is going to be gravitating back towards one dollar. As I said, if you take apart the numbers in the fall economic statement, you'll see that, even though it's relying on low interest rates and heavy borrowing, and if you look at the Parliamentary Budget Office projections, again you'll see the same thing. It's just going to happen, so my plea—