Finance committee  I'm not familiar with the book, so I can't comment directly on it. But in terms of household debt, we've seen a very significant increase in the amount of leverage amongst Canadian households. Part of the explanation for that is that interest rates have come down to remarkably lo

Finance committee  If we look at Canada's success rate in integrating newcomers into the economy, I would say we are facing a pressing challenge. That's one of the reasons I've been encouraged by the immigration reforms the government has been doing. If we look at income level, the difference in in

Finance committee  If we think about wage growth from 1999 to today, I would argue that wage growth has actually been very subdued. In fact, it's been relatively subdued for most workers. If we think about it in terms of high-skilled occupations, wage growth between 1999 and 2010 averaged a gain of

Finance committee  Wage growth has been weak. Investment returns, though, have not been strong over a 10-year period because of the very deep financial crisis we had. But your point is well taken. One of the things we've been talking about here is income inequality, but if you look at asset inequ

Finance committee  No. What we have seen, for example, and this is something that has been recognized for some time, is that we do have labour shortages in areas like trades, and the laws of economics work so that if you have a scarcity of people with a set of skills, those individuals are going to

Finance committee  As I said in some of the earlier remarks, one of the things we have seen is a shift toward higher skills and higher value-added jobs. We've also seen.... We did have a 30-year unemployment rate before the recession that was actually putting upward pressure on compensation for tra

Finance committee  I'm not a tax expert, but I can tell you that one of the barriers to getting out of poverty is the enormously high marginal effective tax rate on income when you start to lose your government support programs. In many provinces, for every dollar of additional income you generate

Finance committee  The rate of return on the investment in early childhood education is enormously high. In terms of the rate of return, for every dollar you invest, most academic studies show anything from $1.50 to $2.50 of economic and social return, and if you focus on people from disadvantaged

Finance committee  Investment in Canada is very uneven across the provinces. It does lead to inequitable access to early childhood education.

Finance committee  In the United States there really has been a very deep hollowing out of the middle class. In Canada we also see signs that there has been weaker growth in employment for middle-skill, middle-income jobs. It's less pronounced than the United States. I think part of that is a funct

Finance committee  But what you can see is that we have had a shift in employment. There's been a drop in lower-skill and middle-skill jobs and an increase in high-skill jobs. This has also been reflected in wages. It's contributing to some of the income inequality that we're seeing. As more people

Finance committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today on this important issue. I think one of the core issues is that across the entire industrialized countries, we've been seeing rising income inequality. This is a product of the capitalist economic system,