Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all the witnesses for their very interesting comments. I would like to especially thank Ms. Westhaver for her testimony. I really liked when you brought the human touch of what you said, bringing a sense of peace in palliative care. It reminds us that there are humans behind this important work that this committee is doing.
I would like to focus my question with Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee, it really struck me when you said that the single most important issue for western countries is aging. I believe Mr. Miller also reverberated this comment.
I have a paper here that you wrote in 2016. It was entitled “Ottawa's plunge into deficits needs an exit strategy”. In this paper you said:
The biggest risk is that we slide inadvertently back into a fiscal hole that we cannot extract ourselves from.
My grandmother used to say, “He who pays his debt grows rich”.
I'm sorry; I went fast and I switched languages, but that's what my grandma used to say. She was not speaking English at that time, but that's what she said.
She would say, “He who pays his debt grows rich”.
That's kind of what she said.
My question to you is this. We are in relative period of prosperity, and still we are running a deficit. Are those deficits and the debt that Canada already has putting at risk our capacity to cope with what you described as the grey tsunami? As a society, are we playing with the future, not only of the country but of being able to cope with the needs of the elders that are coming in a large number in this country?