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Finance committee First and foremost, it's about training. It's about accreditation, to some extent, and flexibility across the economy, portability across the economy. We've made advancements there, but this is an issue that's just going to run and run and run and needs constant vigilance and inv
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee If I may, there are very important segments of our population, the aboriginal first nations segments, where this is paramount and needs to be attacked by both sides.
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee Without question, the decline in underwriting standards in the U.S., in a variety of forms, contributed to that rise in the housing bubble. I mean, the Americans got to a position on the eve of the crisis where about 15% of mortgages were subprime.
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee Yes. The expectation at the time of the mortgage insurers was that this would be a niche product and that the underwriting standards would be consistent with a 25-year amortization mortgage. In other words, the individuals who qualified for a 40-year-long amortization mortgage wo
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee That was the point I was going to make. But it was not a niche product; it became the norm as a consequence of that. I think what happened here, quite frankly, is that the long amortization and an expectation of lower interest rates for longer combined for people to forget the
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee Hindsight is always 20/20, Mr. Brison.
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee Well, I actually think they—
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee I think Canadians are listening, actually, and if you look at the chart you referenced, on page 20, in English, you see the blue line particularly, which is the year-on-year growth of total household debt—mortgages and including consumer and credit card debt—and that has fallen t
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee Yes. Well, there were a few factors that weighed on growth in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, including hurricanes and other one-off factors. Importantly, though, at that time we did expect, and we have seen, the effects of the uncertainty around U.S. fiscal policy weighing on pa
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee The quality of forecasting is something we look at. If we look at forecasting relative to consensus and relative to other external observers, such as the IMF, which publishes a forecast for Canada, on average we are slightly better than that consensus since the recession crisis a
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee Speaking to Ms. Nash's question, it's significant from a fiscal perspective, when coupled with lower GDP inflation. But in terms of the dynamics of Canadian growth, what's important, if one wants to look at the positives—and we should look at the positives sometimes as well as th
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee To be frank, our expectation is that there would be very limited revenue-generating capacity from that tax, unless the tax is truly global, because it's far too easy to move financial transactions to other jurisdictions. The experience of Sweden is instructive. They tried a simi
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee I'll make these both quick, and it won't do them justice. One of the most important elements with respect to inequality is intergenerational inequality—to what extent your economic position is predicated on that of your parents. In this regard, it's a question of equality of opp
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee All right. I'll give you a very quick written response on this, which will be at a high level.
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney
Finance committee With respect to the mortgages that are still out there, the issue is that with a longer-amortization mortgage there's very little amortization obviously in the early years; effectively, a household is just paying interest. The risk is that five years out or even 10 years out, as
February 12th, 2013Committee meeting
Mark Carney