Finance committee  I suggest that it's a foundation for our growth and is likely to remain very important. How much more or less important it becomes, I really couldn't say. What I do know is that we are still in a development phase, in countries such as China or India, where growth itself, which is high, is fairly commodity-intensive, unlike growth in our own economy, which is less so.

Finance committee  Thank you. You may have stretched my metaphor a little too far.

Finance committee  What I'm trying to capture in my reference to the post-war period is that there were companies that were there before and are not now. The recovery process requires the re-formation of companies and the development of brand new companies or the expansion of existing companies. This is not the same as your traditional textbook cycle.

Finance committee  That's absolutely the case, but I don't discount the manufacturing sector at all. I have many case studies that we could talk about in which the manufacturing sector is flourishing in Canada by finding exactly what the foreign customer wants and doing an efficient job of producing it.

Finance committee  That may be a bit of a quick summary of what I discussed at the time. At the time, what we were doing was identifying symptoms and wondering how long they might persist and where they might lead. Those symptoms were quite correlated with what Holland saw in that time period. I certainly don't describe what we have today as anything remotely like that.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Well, in reference to that—

Finance committee  A brief response?

Finance committee  With pleasure, Mr. Chair. That's a very complicated question, and it's far outside the bounds of monetary policy. I would just observe that I saw it in action with my own children. The experiences they accumulated were very valuable to them once they started getting paid.

Finance committee  Thank you. There are actually lots of questions in there, so I'll do my utmost to touch on them. First of all, let's begin with the premise that we are very lucky that we have these resources. Whenever we get to develop them and sell them to the rest of the world, up until now it has been like money in the bank.

Finance committee  Thank you. I can make this one really brief, because I simply don't know the answer. You're talking here about a 30-year story. A lot can happen in that time, and while it's clear that part of that story can't come true without our also making some kind of investment in infrastructure, it obviously won't have much to do with monetary policy.

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. As for dead money, I believe my predecessor himself has declared it resurrected. Our characterization of that is a little different. It would be that, in effect, companies in Canada have healthy balance sheets, and that's a good thing. The process that I described before will be much more difficult if foreign demand is building and our confidence gets up and we don't have the balance sheet available to do the job.

Finance committee  Thank you. Yes, I do. The story we're talking about—healthy balance sheets, getting ready to invest, and being confident—is not uniquely but heavily influenced in the export sector. It's in that sector where we had disproportionate damage of the type we've talked about, because it was foreign demand that did the biggest collapse.

Finance committee  Thank you. I am concerned. My concern is that we do the right things to ensure that this does not last for a generation. That is exactly what the policy is about, that the low rate, hopefully for not too long, gives you the outcomes you need to get through this crisis. Then as the world unfolds, we get back to normal.

Finance committee  Absolutely, and as I mentioned earlier on, it's fully a team effort. This is the responsibility of the Minister of Finance, not of the Bank of Canada per se. The Bank of Canada participates more as an adviser, providing deeper research, that kind of thing. We sit at the table with OSFI, with CDIC, and the ministry of Finance, as a very strong team.