Finance committee  I think a lot of lessons are to be learned and obviously there will be, and I think I undersell it to say, a post-mortem on what the crisis has taught us. Looking forward, structural changes to things like employment insurance and what we've learned around the interaction between

Finance committee  Obviously, this has been highlighted as a key risk to the Canadian economy going into COVID-19. I think the fundamentals are pretty clear to everybody. Canadians were bearing a pretty heavy debt load in relation to their income. Probably the best flagship measure is the debt-to-i

Finance committee  I won't give you a long-drawn-out response, but deficits as a share of the economy are smaller now than they were, probably, during that period.

Finance committee  I'm sorry. I don't have my trusty fiscal reference tables.

Finance committee  Yes, no problem.

Finance committee  Yes. That's my opinion.

Finance committee  From the perspective of a stimulus to the economy, I think this was a measure that was valued once mature. We're talking about the first round of the CCB and the CCB enhancement being, I think, in the range of $6 billion a year, Andrew...?

Finance committee  It was in the range of $6 billion a year. If you put that in context of a $2.3-trillion economy, it did provide a boost to growth in early 2016—like a fiscal impulse in 2016 and 2017. It was well timed. The economy was weak coming off a hangover from the global oil price shock, s

Finance committee  Hugely important is access to these growing, large global marketplaces. That is huge for our Canadian exporters across the board: again the energy sector, non-energy sector and our service sectors. Again, previous governments and this government have made important investments

Finance committee  I can invite my colleague to give you a whole commentary on things we've done to support export development. I don't know the number there, but yes, our investments in our Trade Commissioner Service—

Finance committee  —and missions and embassies around the world have been bolstered over the last couple of years. There are more boots on the ground selling Canadian companies into these foreign markets.

Finance committee  In entering the last recession, the great recession in 2009, the Bank of Canada was operating at a monetary policy rate of I think 4.75%. I mean, they had a lot of room between 4.75% and, let's just call it the lower bound at that time, of 0%. They had a lot of monetary policy ro

Finance committee  Yes, and I just want to say this isn't a Canada-specific thing. This is a global phenomenon where central banks have been easing through conventional and unconventional monetary policy for the last 10 years, so every central bank has a whole different starting point than it had 1

Finance committee  It is kind of a longer story line. You just look at investment levels and the Canadian economy, let's say in the early 2010s when oil prices were riding near $100 a barrel and there were a lot of capital inflows into the Canadian economy really concentrated in the energy sector.

Finance committee  From a public sector perspective, I think indeed we are concerned about rising debt levels in the provinces. They have exceeded their previous historical peaks. That is in the context of facing, as I said, acute pressures in their social and health systems over the next generatio