Happy 30th.
Mr. Aylward, I want to apologize for laughing. I wasn't laughing at the.... I have tremendous respect for public service workers. The only reason I was laughing is that it's absolutely deadpan embarrassing that a G7 country can't pay its workers. I apologize, but the laughter was out of embarrassment for our country.
Thank you for that.
I want to talk to you a bit, Mr. Cross, about inflation and a piece you wrote in which you talked about combatting inflation. Of course, we've heard a lot about the Bank of Canada. The last time this came around in the 1970s and 1980s, as Mr. Dehejia talked about, it was cured by very high interest rates put in place by Mr. Volcker in the United States.
One of the cures, as we've heard from Mr. Macklem, is that he's had to increase interest rates, but you also talked about how fiscal policy or government spending has an impact on that. You even talked about how, in the 1980s, part of the reason they were able to get inflation under control was that the government reduced spending.
I was wondering if you could comment a bit, Mr. Cross, about the impact that fiscal policy can have on inflation.