Mr. Speaker, that was a tough question, but a fair question. I want to thank my neighbouring member just to the south, who is very well respected as a former mayor. He was actually quite an old man when he became mayor, 22 years old, and here he is, serving on the floor of Parliament. The community loves him, and with good reason. He asks an important question.
When we have too much debt, we can “debtonate”, and we are becoming a “debtonation”. Our debt is 400% of GDP. We have a $2.2-trillion economy with $8.6 trillion of household, corporate and government debt. That is a ratio that we have never seen before in this country, and it has increased by almost one-third just in the last five years alone. The only reason we have been able to get away with this much debt is that interest rates have been supernaturally low for an unusually long period of time, and more recently have been driven further by the Bank of Canada printing cheap money and pumping it into the system. However, eventually that comes to an end. If rates rise before debts go down, then we will have a debt crisis.
Now is the time to stave that off by replacing our credit card economy with a paycheque economy.