Thank you very much.
The confusion—and I'll be generous to my colleagues and call it “confusion”—might stem from the fact that the governor has talked about two different things. One is that he's talked about the annual increase in the carbon tax, of which he has ascribed 0.15% to the increase. However, of the overall carbon tax, he's ascribed 0.6%. I'll quote Governor Macklem in response to my question:
The second question you asked me was what the effect of inflation would be if the carbon tax were eliminated. That would create a one-time drop in inflation of 0.6 percentage points.
That's from the transcript.
Earlier on, I asked him about increases, and he said:
One question is how much the increases in the carbon tax are adding to inflation each year. That number is about 0.15 percentage points....
We add the 0.15%—and I actually asked him about this—to the 0.6%, and he said that it's actually, all together, 0.8%.
The current rate of inflation is 3.1%, I believe. Oh, it's 2.9%, so that's fully a quarter, if not almost a third, of inflation. If we removed that 0.8%, we'd be down to 2.1%.
The Bank of Canada's range is 2%, so we'd be within the margin of being within range, which would then allow us, guys, to reduce mortgage rates, reduce interest rates and get the economy going just by cutting the carbon tax.