Finance committee  I'd just like to strongly recommend that you read Alberto Alesina's book, Austerity, that came out in 2019. He just passed away, unfortunately, last week. It is a wonderful study—200 cases that he looked at among OECD countries with his colleagues—and what you said is actually in

Finance committee  First of all I think what people want is to get back to work, and they want to see growth. The only way you're going to get people back to work is to start making sure that governments can get out of the way of that growth and not make it harder to achieve. In other words, there

Finance committee  The answer is basically yes. I guess the question is, how do you make sure it's provided? Right now, I would just like to get kids back into school and get our current child care back on its feet, because the pandemic has closed down so many facilities. I do think that we just n

Finance committee  I think it has to be understood that what I'm raising today is sort of the next issue once we start getting back into recovery. [Technical difficulty—Editor] anticipate at some point the Minister of Finance is going to have to present a budget, and it's going to be very importan

Finance committee  I did a calculation, but I can't remember the details of it. I think the best thing would be for me to send it. Should I send a note to the clerk with that calculation?

Finance committee  I would use the government bond rate of 10 years. It's at around 0.6% right now, or roughly around that point. It would be going up to 1.6%. The average term structure is, as I said, 5.6%. Actually, Canada has a lot of short-term public debt, so one has to look at that a little m

Finance committee  I'll be very quick, Mr. Chair, because you said half a minute. We have to remember that interest costs are two things. They are the interest rate times the actual amount of debt. We're taking on a huge amount of debt right now at the public level. Plus we have significant debt a

Finance committee  You're raising an interesting point. We have to remember that interest payments, on public debt in this case, are a form of transfer. They're a transfer from the government budget—but of course that's really the taxpayers' budget—to bondholders. Of course, the taxpayers tend to

Finance committee  You're absolutely right. I do remember that time. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Let me begin with four points. One, according to the IMF April report, Canadian consolidated public deficits—that's for all levels of government—as a share of GDP will be the second-highest amo

Finance committee  I'm thinking specifically about China. Its bounceback is not as quick as people think. One of the things holding it back is [Inaudible—Editor]. If we come out sooner in terms of when people can get back to work, one of the things we may have to do is continue travel bans with aff

Finance committee  When we get out of this—right now everything is about liquidity and I hope we can turn the tide. The more I hear people saying that it is going to be a whole year, I am extremely worried about the effect it's going to have on the world economy if we shut down the economy for a ve

Finance committee  Well, there are three potential responses when you have a huge increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio. At that point you have to be careful because you want to make sure you sell your bonds. The first way of trying to address that, as in different periods such as after world wars or s

Finance committee  I think that when we come out of this, we will have destroyed some of.... This is a huge supply shock on the economy. We're also dealing with a reduced amount of supply and the misallocation of resources, to the extent that there are bankruptcies, firms going out of business, etc

Finance committee  Again, this goes back to my comment that I really think you need to use the banking system, because banks have the reach, and programs could be put into place much faster. There may be a role for regional development programs in assisting with things as they move along, but I'm n

Finance committee  Okay. Those are not easy questions. On the start-ups and the wage program, the 30% rule is a problem, because obviously there are companies that haven't yet generated revenues but have made major expenditures. They expected contracts to come in, and in fact some of those contrac