Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you to our witnesses for being here.
I'm going to start on a line of questioning about the intersection between fiscal and monetary policy as part of the pandemic response.
Mr. Macklem, you've led off your remarks describing the fact that there's a public health threat that has posed a serious risk to our economy. It's not as though there's some fundamental, underpinning problem with the economy, but instead, an exogenous shock to the economy.
You've made a number of decisions, as the Bank, to reduce our interest rate to the effective lower bound, as well as the quantitative easing that you described in your opening testimony. This says to me that you may have used the tools in your tool bag, and if I'm looking to find the tools to continue to solve the pandemic response, either from a public health or economic perspective, the remaining tool is really fiscal policy.
Can you describe to me where you think the federal government should aim its sights to most effectively deal with the pandemic? Specifically, should we be targeting public health measures that will help eliminate this virus quickly and, second, getting cash to those households and businesses that are in need by extending life support to them effectively, so they're still here when this pandemic is over to help the economy come back once the virus is behind us?