Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Governor Macklem, for being here and for all of your patience.
I'm going to be asking you a question around the comments you made about the fact that core inflation has proven to be quite stubborn. I'm going to then talk about some of the underlying structural issues, and then tie it to something that we're hearing on housing.
One of the things I've been grappling with is that when I talk to Davenport residents, they'll say to me, “Julie, everything's so high.” I'll say to them that we've put in a national child care program and that we are putting in aggressive climate action but are providing the climate incentive. We have the Canada child benefit. We have the old age security increase. We lowered taxes several years ago. We've put in an extraordinary amount of support for our middle class and our working class, and I haven't mentioned the Canada workers benefit, but we've increased that a number of times, and they're all geared to inflation.
You would almost think that they should be okay. We know that food prices have gone up more than inflation. We know that energy prices have gone up and have now come back down again, and then we've been talking about housing.
One of the other things that we're hearing about in our housing study is that there are issues.... At the provincial level in Ontario, if someone moves out of their apartment, the average vacancy rate increase that goes in is around 29%.
I guess my question to you is this: Would that be an example of a structural issue that would cause our core inflation rate to continue to be stubborn? That would be a structural issue at the provincial level that needs to be corrected.