Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for coming today. Unfortunately, we have a limited amount of time, and we have some wonderful folks here.
I'm going to focus my questions on Mr. Robson to start with.
Mr. Robson, I commend you for a well-timed opinion piece in The Globe and Mail today. I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about that. Perhaps before we get there, though, I will say that we've had a number of economists before this committee, including some chief economists of financial institutions such as the Bank of Canada, who have painted a picture of the economy that is very different from the one the Department of Finance is painting.
Growth is robust. The slack has been absorbed in the economy. Unemployment is below where it was prior to the pandemic. These are all good things, so why is it that we need to continue with significant amounts of deficit spending?