Finance committee  If we're having a back-and-forth conversation, I understand your point, but that wouldn't be my principal argument. My principal argument is that when times get tough and we have to make adjustments—like the fiscal interventions, as I call the 1995 Chrétien decision, which I strongly supported, or the monetary interventions of the early 1980s by Paul Volcker and by the Bank of Canada—it falls disproportionately on low-income people and minorities.

Finance committee  They are the people who pay the price.

Finance committee  That's because of the adjustments, cutbacks in programs, layoffs of people who are employed, that sort of thing. That's where the adjustment falls.

Finance committee  Again, I see your point, and to continue this quick back and forth, I was trying to impress today on the parliamentarians here—every one of you—that this is not just a theoretical debate. It's going to fall on your desk on the day that one of those provinces contacts the Government of Canada for financial assistance because they are no longer able to pay their bills as they become due.

Finance committee  Okay, but I wasn't expecting that. I don't want to go deep into the weeds, but without getting into things like monetizing the debt and that sort of thing, governments borrow their money, although they don't have to. I'm talking about federal governments, sovereign governments. We have a printing press called a central bank.

Finance committee  We're talking sovereign borrowers, governments, not subnational governments, because they don't have—

Finance committee  The Government of Canada raises money in the bond market.

Finance committee  It sells bonds in the capital markets to pension funds, hedge funds, wealth funds and so forth. Money in the real economy, however, is being paid for those bonds, that is to say, they're not being printed, as I used the phrase colloquially. It's not being monetized.

Finance committee  There are two or three questions in there. I know that there are some people who think that deficits and national debt are bad. I simply don't subscribe to that. I think there's a very substantial body of economic theory that would argue against that. It's not the idea that there is a national debt or a deficit; it's partly whether there's a need for it.

Finance committee  Thank you. First, I'm not from that camp, and I don't think any reasonable person is, that the Government of Canada cannot afford a $20-billion deficit. Of course it can. There's no question about it. It has an enormous fiscal capacity. The PBO has documented that. We don't need to read the PBO report; we just have to read the monetary policy reports, as I do every six months, that are published by the Bank of Canada.

Finance committee  The question is, ought we? Should we? If you assume, as I do—and I don't think it's a big assumption—that public resources and public revenues are scarce and they're not infinite.... You have a finite amount of revenue, and as Aaron Wildavsky, the late great dean of public policy at Berkeley said, government is about making choices.

Finance committee  I thank the committee for inviting me to appear. I will just note that I don't represent anyone because I don't consult to anyone or anything anywhere. I'm merely a poor professor. Today, I will focus on only one issue in this mammoth budget implementation bill, and that's the federal deficit of the Government of Canada.

Human Resources committee  I don't have the exact data. I've got some fragments I can quote to you. I've got it packaged, obviously—

Human Resources committee  Let me do it this way. First off, even though I did come up with sort of apocalyptic numbers, it's because they're there. It's real. In 20 years, 25% of the totality of Canada is going to be over 65. That's a reality. That's not a theory; that is hard data. It's the same for the U.S., as it is for Europe.

Human Resources committee  I see people around me. My mother lived on her own until age 91, and she died in her own house. It was her own choice. It was her own choice with hospice at home. I haven't had the chance to shout out to the hospice movement. I can't say enough good about them. We need to be funding them way more than we do.