Madam Speaker, it is really quite simple. When the debt-to-GDP ratio is somewhere around 400%, where we have $4 of debt, public and private combined, for every dollar of GDP, they could assume that a 1% increase in the effective interest rate on our economy would be equal to 4% of our economy. Given that the economy only grows by 1.5% a year, that is like two and a half years of growth. It is an enormous impact. The Liberals say that is okay because the interest rates are low, but they never tell us what is going to happen when interest rates finally go up.
They also never tell us that the only reason interest rates are low is because the Bank of Canada is printing hundreds of billions of dollars in order to buy up government debt and suppress interest rates. It is not because the market has deemed that rates should be low; it is because the Bank of Canada has cranked up its printing presses. This is not a new idea. This has been tried by emperors and kings and governments for thousands of years and results always in the same consequence.
We know what happens when we debase a currency. It ends up costing the working people, by reducing the value of their wages, while enriching the insiders whose assets are appreciated in value. There is a massive wealth transfer from working poor to the super rich, and here we have a government in collaboration with the Bank of Canada, doing it all over again.