Finance committee  I wouldn't say it's the source. The difficulty from monetary policy is that they wanted to support the economy. Their main lever for doing that is their policy rate, so they lowered the policy rate. Interest rates have been low for many years, and this has fuelled housing markets throughout the world.

Finance committee  I think there seems to be quite a strong consensus—not just at the OECD, but the IMF as well, and also within Canada—that if there could be faster progress on identifying where these interprovincial trade barriers barriers can be reduced, it would be good for the Canadian economy in the long term.

Finance committee  You'd have a lot of households struggling, compared to the way you are now. In the situation that governments faced in March and April last year, there was a high degree of uncertainty. Many governments, including the Canadian government, were trying to think of ways of supporting households and businesses in a very rapidly evolving situation.

Finance committee  Your public debt burden is relatively low compared to many other OECD countries, and borrowing costs are fairly low. In a way, this is partly why in good times, it's good to be aiming for creating that kind of fiscal space. It's to deal with situations such as this one so that you can, for instance, increase your debt-to-GDP ratio in a short space of time by, say, 15 percentage points.

Finance committee  It's one way of ensuring that you bring public debt under control. Historically, Canada seems to have, in a way, done reasonably well through a mechanism of fairly broad fiscal targets. They're not terribly precisely defined. That kind of system can work if there's sufficient political will behind those broad objectives.

Finance committee  As I mentioned, the near-term priority has to remain the recovery of the economy. We underscore the importance of keeping these supplementary support programs open until the economy really is on a firm footing. However, we emphasize that there is a need to look towards a fiscal plan that ensures that you don't have a spiralling public debt further out.

Finance committee  Yes. Canada is among countries—the other country I work in is Norway, and there are other examples around the world at the moment—where the house prices have continued to rise quite steeply through the pandemic. What we're facing here is this classic situation in which, in order to help the economy, the interest rates have been reduced.

Finance committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity to appear before the Standing Committee on Finance. This presentation draws largely on the OECD economic survey of Canada that was published on March 11. Our report is generally positive about the suite of economic policy measures that was introduced in 2020 and the subsequent evolution of those measures.