Yes, exactly. That was going to be the next part of my sentence. Those deficits quickly disappeared when the CERB and the other emergency programs were eliminated. We've seen a historic restoration of fiscal balance faster than was expected at the time, in part because of the faster economic recovery that those emergency programs facilitated.
Now we have a situation where the budget in national accounts terms is effectively balanced and cannot be playing any role. There's an argument that has been made that the fiscal stimulus overdid it and that Canadians piled away billions and billions of dollars of extra savings that are now being used to pump up the prices of scarce commodities, and that's not consistent with the evidence. In fact, savings rates among Canadians are still higher than usual, so Canadians are still saving, not dissaving. They're not spending that pile of cash. One of the reasons they're saving is that they're worried about a recession coming around the corner. Ironically, the fear of a recession can make the risk of recession greater, because consumers stop spending and start saving.
Neither at the time of a deficit nor afterwards is there a convincing macroeconomic case that those temporary deficits caused the inflation. Inflation has been a global phenomenon. There's no relationship in countries between the deficit size and the inflation that they've experienced.