I'll just preface my answer to that by saying that I think there is a disconnect between what the people appearing before your committee are saying writ large and what the finance minister, Minister Morneau, is going to tell you this afternoon. It's not me—he is going to tell you that the revenues are down, not up. People coming before this committee are saying, “Spend a lot more”, while the government revenues are going down. That's what I mean by a disconnect or mismatch between the advice you are getting and the economic reality that Minister Morneau faces. That's not going to change.
I have one more quick point, just to get this on the record. There is a very substantial number—I don't want to say dozens—of highly reliable studies from very authoritative sources—I'm talking the IMF, the OECD, the Federal Reserve bank, the Bank of Canada, Finance Canada—showing that aging.... The only debate is, how much does aging reduce the economic growth? There is no debate that it reduces growth. Some say it's 1%. Some say it's 1.5%, and some say it's 2%. We know that the days of the seventies, eighties, nineties, and even the first decade of the 21st century are behind us. We are not going back to 4% and 5% GDP growth. We are looking at 1% to 2% GDP growth. The only question is—which is what I said in my closing comments—whether there is any way we can grow the pie so as to counter this drag on the economy called aging.
I am not a defeatist. I'm not saying, “Oh, well, the game's over. Let's all give up and go home.” I am saying there are things we can do. I don't agree that it's classical tired old Keynesian stimulus—just print and spend money. The advisory committee to Minister Morneau has pointed the way: economic immigration, infrastructure, an infrastructure bank, and so forth. There are things we can do. We can reduce the huge barriers to interprovincial trade in this country, which will raise incomes. Every time we talk about raising incomes, every MP should say, “Ah, that means more revenues to the federal and provincial governments to spend”, because that's what we are talking about.
It's not about how we can spend more money for anti-poverty programs, when we are not even confronting the underlying problem, which, in my view, is the lack of employability. Secondly, we are advocating solutions that are going to be very expensive and that, the reality is, Minister Morneau is not going to accept. I don't believe that any finance minister will accept an enormous increase in spending on CPP or on the social transfers. We have to deal with the reality we are confronting.
As I said, I think we can do things to increase the size of the pie, which means more revenues flow in to spend for health care, social policy, and so forth.