Finance committee  Thank you very much. Thank you all.

Finance committee  That's it.

Finance committee  Certainly. We've known for a long time that automatic stabilizers aren't very sensitive to the economy. In another era, one study estimated that automatic stabilization was almost equivalent to a change of less than 1% in the interest rate. Very recently, we talked about the re

Finance committee  Let me just portray two channels for illustration. One I've mentioned before, so I can be quick. That is, John Doe perhaps owns a small business and relies on a credit line for the fluctuations in his business. He has money coming in, but of course, he has money going out, and wh

Finance committee  The level of international coordination has been quite high. The G7 and the G20 have been meeting regularly. This morning was the big IMF meeting, which is, of course, most of the world. What you see is a lot of commonality across the fiscal reactions, at least in the types of t

Finance committee  That conversation is really just getting started. We talked a bit about that yesterday in the G20 meeting. Basically what is going on is a lot of consultation with the private sector. It almost looks a bit like grand-scale industrial planning, asking “When can you get started and

Finance committee  Yes. I think the number you suggest is not an unreasonable one in terms of how much we could end up losing this year, but what will happen is that we're going below capacity, and as I said, we're going to be in a disinflationary zone. It means that the economy will be able to gro

Finance committee  You want to explore the worst-case scenario. Let's talk about that. First of all, as I've said a couple of times, the centrepiece of the policy response is fiscal and the most important tools in the fiscal response are what I call “elastic” tools. They will grow automatically if

Finance committee  That would be a nice problem to have, to be frank. As a consensus among economists, our biggest concern here is that, net net, this will be a disinflationary occurrence, that the economy will recover slowly enough that there's persistent downward pressure on inflation. That's why

Finance committee  Yes. When we get back to normal, interest rates will certainly rise.

Finance committee  What I said at the time, and I guess I still feel that way, is that it really is a question for the Minister of Finance, not for the Bank of Canada. If the Government of Canada would like to have some form of borrowing hub for the provinces, that would be a government policy for

Finance committee  I agree that it is sobering. That's for sure. I'm less of a fan of the metaphor of life-support. I think of it as stopping the clock. As I said before, we stop the clock in as many respects as possible and just let everybody sit back. Then we're going to restart the clock. Of c

Finance committee  I'll start and then turn it over to Ms. Wilkins. Please bear in mind that the purpose of these programs is to help the market function better. It is not to somehow fix the cash needs of a government, whether it's municipal or provincial. The municipal bond market is a relatively

Finance committee  That question probably is best saved for two or three months from now, when we actually have some data on how the economy has behaved through this, but we do know the dollar amounts, from the PBO and so on. We have ideas of how much money is actually flowing in. Let's say it is i

Finance committee  That's an excellent question. Statistics Canada gave that very preliminary figure for the first quarter. The figure is -2.6%. In comparison, our scenario anticipates that the contraction for the first quarter will be between 1% and 3%. This is exactly along the same lines. It's