Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  If you look in our appendix, we describe in some detail the sources of potential upward growth. In the last decade, labour force growth was increased at about one percentage point. With the baby boomers retiring, that is going down. By 2015, we have it at half that, half a percen

Finance committee  No, I don't think there is much to add. As the governor indicated, in terms of fiscal policy, whether it's federal, provincial, or municipal, our projections pertaining to the Monetary Policy Report are based on the announced policy tracks, so it takes into account what has bee

Finance committee  As fiscal policy changes, that would have an influence on our assessment, and we take that into account, along with everything else, in taking our monetary policy decisions.

Finance committee  I didn't really understand your question. In our two last reports, we tried to provide more detail on the risks, as the governor mentioned at the beginning of his remarks. When decisions about monetary policy are being made, uncertainty has to be taken into account. Risk manageme

Finance committee  The changes to the format of the report don't really stem from that risk. We wanted to better explain the fact that we took the risks into account and their bearing on monetary policy.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Yes, I can, and it actually follows nicely on Peggy Nash's question. We were talking before about why exports have underperformed. Looking forward, there are some good reasons to expect that exports will come back and that the historical relationship with foreign activity will

Finance committee  Yes, I can pick up on that. Before getting into the reasons for the underperformance relative to what we expected, it's worth underlining that the biggest reason exports have been weak is that the U.S. economy, our major export market, has had the deepest recession and the slowes

Finance committee  Yes, I'm getting to that, but you need to know what part of the exports. It is the non-commodity exports. Why? A big part of it is exactly what the governor was saying: this was a very deep recession. A lot of firms closed, and it takes time to rebuild that. Second, there are

Finance committee  Indeed, we share this opinion. Global recovery is important in order to increase demand for exports. So that is one aspect leading to the recovery in Canada. Over the past two quarters last year, we saw weak exports in Canada. However, this situation will improve once there is a

Finance committee  I'll simply add that our exports are more exposed to U.S. private demand than they are to U.S. government spending on goods and services. Sequestration, clearly, if it creates delays at the border, could affect our exports. But the recovery we're seeing in the U.S. housing sector

Finance committee  The key point to keep in mind and to underline is that because interest rates are so low and delinquencies are relatively low, people are not having a huge problem servicing their debt. But with a bigger level of debt, when rates go up, the potential for that problem to rise more

Finance committee  How about I answer the first question?