Households are in a wide diversity of situations. As Mr. Blaikie's question suggested, if you're getting close to retirement or are retired, you're looking at the interest return you can get on your savings. If you're younger and looking to buy your first house, of course you're going to be borrowing and you're going to be paying that interest. Among Canadians, there's a wide spectrum.
What I can say is that the balance sheets of Canadians on average are improved, actually, over the last year. There's about $200 billion of what economists call “excess savings” that households have built up, as I said, because they have been unable to buy a lot of the things they wanted to buy through the pandemic.
We're already seeing that, particularly through the fall as things reopened, they came back to restaurants and came back to recreation. Therefore, that savings rate is starting to come down, but there's still a stock of extra savings.
However, that's not every Canadian. Some Canadians have really stretched to buy that first house, and they are going to be more affected when interest rates go up. As I said earlier today, we recognize that higher interest rates are going to impact Canadians. We're going to be deliberate, we're going to be careful, we're going to be mindful as we do that, and we're going to assess the impacts along the way. The economy is strong and we certainly think it can handle higher interest rates. We think it needs higher interest rates, but being on a rising path doesn't mean we're on autopilot.