What we do at the C.D. Howe Institute is that we take a look out to the future. In what the government has been doing in their outlook for the future in terms of many decades out and what their projected debt-to-GDP ratio is, they have assumed that everything is going to be hunky-dory on the economy for the next couple of decades, but we all know that's not true. We all know that a recession is probably going to come at some point in that period. Then the questions become how much, how bad it is when it comes, how long.... No one knows that.
What we do is that we forecast a range of different assumptions about when that might happen and look at the average of what various recessions might look like. Looking out many years from now, in order to keep under a reasonable assumption of about what kind of recessions we might get in the future, just to get our debt-to-GDP down back to our prepandemic level, we're looking an increase in the GST rate of 2%. If we're looking to pay back all of the debt accumulated during COVID, it's a GST that's 4% higher.