I don't disagree. I only mean to suggest that if we have the potential to do it sooner in the Atlantic region, I hope we take that opportunity, and as soon as public health allows, quite rightly, as you point out, we should be allowing travel within Canada.
I will try to be quick. My comments are directed towards Mr. Moody. I share his concern about needing to manage the fiscal situation in Canada in a prudent way. I think we have disagreement—although I found his testimony interesting—with regard to what that looks like. I point out that we had Kevin Milligan, a professor of economics, testify before the committee in April of 2020. He pointed out that incurring debt was not a choice. It was just a question of where we would allocate that debt. He pointed out that it would fall on households and businesses to bear that debt. If they went bankrupt, the banks would bear that debt, but moreover, the cost of not supporting them would have been a restriction on the growth opportunity at the back end of the pandemic.
I've seen only one group actually do a counterfactual analysis of where we would have been had we not made these investments, and it was the IMF. I'm going from memory here, so I may be off on the statistics. They projected there would have been a decline in GDP in the ballpark of, I think it was, 7.8% and an increase in the unemployment rate of 3.9%. If I can critique your household analogy, there are certain things governments can do that will allow them to either experience a rate of growth greater than the cost of that debt or prevent a loss that would be far greater than the cost of that debt. If we take that to the extreme end of the logic, if we didn't invest in any public health measures and we forced everyone to shut down because the virus was so rampant, we would have spent less. However, the IMF actually found that our debt-to-GDP ratio would have been the same, but our growth opportunity would have been severely hamstrung by that course of action.
I'm curious as to whether you recognize that there may in some instances be a need to spend more and that doing that could be the fiscally responsible thing because of either the growth opportunity it would represent or the losses that we would avoid.