Thank you for the question. Actually, I have before me the speech that I gave then, which I reviewed this morning. Let me say that the challenges of secular stagnation, as it has been called by people like Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard, were significant challenges to western industrialized economies prior to the COVID recession and continue to be a serious medium-term risk.
What the secular stagnation we experienced showed us, and the longer-term challenge there, is that western industrialized economies face a challenge in the medium term of subpar growth with an aging demographic. That challenge of subpar growth, of deflation, which probably prior to COVID we saw most notably in Japan, is indeed something that policy-makers who think about the medium and long term, as we certainly do at the Department of Finance, need to be concerned about. I think it's absolutely appropriate to be thinking about those medium-term structural challenges of subpar growth, of deflation. That actually is one of the reasons that I think we as a country really need to focus on how we can bring in structural policies that will structurally improve Canada's long-term growth trajectory.
I would like to return to some recent comments made by an economist I respect very much and I know Prime Minister Harper respected very much, and that is Stephen Poloz. When he was interviewed a couple of weeks ago, he said, and I'm quoting him now, that “what the stimulus did was...keep the economy from going into a deep hole in which we would have experienced persistent deflation”. On the issue of deflation, I think it's important to divide it into two parts. There's the medium-term pre-COVID trend. I think it's actually a consensus of mainstream economists that there was a long-term challenge of secular stagnation.