Thank you for the question.
Like you, I suppose, Mr. Chambers, I am struck by the degree to which baseline spending, if we can refer to it that way, has been escalating with every budget and fiscal update, such that when the COVID-related measures recede, we are looking at a federal government that is considerably larger than it used to be. I understand that there are a lot of unmet needs the federal government is particularly well placed to satisfy, but the increase in operating costs alone is quite startling. The federal government has a big wage bill. It has a big pension liability, which inflation is going to make worse.
What I was hoping to see and didn't see in budget 2022 was a fiscal track that really gave us the room to rebuild the federal government's fiscal capacity for the next thing that comes along. We have a bit of a practice, it seems, of treating everything we encounter—the financial crisis of 2008-09, COVID just now and maybe Russia attacking Ukraine is in this category—as though they're all once-in-a-century events. I think a prudent fiscal track would restore fiscal capacity quickly in order for us to be ready for whatever comes along next.
Already in the presentations today we've heard about, for example, adaptation to climate change. That's very expensive. The federal government talks a lot about it, but I don't see the provision for that, which will surely be very expensive.