I did say that at the time. This wasn't Monday morning quarterbacking, as we know four years later. When we drove the rates down to a quarter of one point and the finance minister and the Prime Minister were saying to borrow because they were going to stay at these levels, I instantly realized that they had made a mistake. Let me explain why.
I did my research. Rates had never in the history of Canada or the United States gone down to a quarter of one point. I went all the way back to the U.S. Civil War and they never went down to a quarter of one point. In Canada, in the Great Depression, which was 10 years—much longer than the pandemic and with a third of the population out of work—they didn't go down to a quarter of one point.
My point is that rates were so low that it was inevitable that they were going to go up. It was not possible, by any rational analysis of the historical record of interest rates, that they would remain at basically zero. I was very critical of that, and I lived through the seventies, when rates went to 20% to deal with the inflation of the government at the time, which hit 14%.