Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Governor Macklem, for being here today. Your availability over the course of this pandemic has been very important, and we thank you for that.
I have a couple of questions around both the Bank of Canada's mandate and the implications on monetary policy of fiscal policy, which you mentioned earlier. We know that it really is a tale of two countries. During this pandemic we have seen Canada's billionaires increase their wealth by $78 billion so far. We've seen massive profiteering in certain sectors and we have seen some Canadians, wealthier Canadians, being able to put away savings as you mentioned.
Canada continues to have the worst level of family debt in the G7 and the lowest saving rate in the G7. At the same time, over 50% of Canadians struggle to put food on the table. According to the most recent figures, as you know, half of Canadians are within $200 of insolvency on any given month. That has been exacerbated by this pandemic.
What we see is a growing chasm between a smaller number of Canadians who are increasingly wealthy and a large mass of Canadians who are absolutely struggling to make ends meet, yet we have a government that has practised failed fiscal policy, hasn't put in place a wealth tax like other countries and hasn't put in place a pandemic profit tax, even though during the Second World War we had that in place and it allowed us to fight Nazism and fascism and, after the war, put in place all of the infrastructure contributing to health, education, transport and housing that allowed us to build a prosperous economy.
My question is twofold. First is on the implications on monetary policy of what is a failed fiscal policy where the wealthiest citizens are simply not paying anywhere remotely like their fair share of taxes. Then secondly, in terms of the consultations that the Bank of Canada has done, increasingly people have been raising in the course of those consultations the impacts of targeting full employment at the same time as there is inflation targeted. In other words, having a dual mandate for the Bank of Canada on monetary policy.
I recognize that monetary policy can't solve all of the problems of failed fiscal policy, but increasingly, as you note, with half a million people who haven't been able to return to their jobs and knowing from the past that it takes up to 10 years for the economy to recover for lower-income people, as we saw during the Spanish flu pandemic, what do you think the implications are for having a mandate that actually takes into consideration full employment?