Finance committee  What I tried to talk about earlier is the concern that I just mentioned about overzealous spending that can lead to more debt and then, of course, potentially more inflation. We don't have inflationary pressures right now, and we may not see them for several years or a couple of

Finance committee  No, you're thinking like demand was creating more growth. We have a supply shock. You could throw tons of money at people and they won't go out and spend, which is what happened. Consumption actually declined and savings went up hugely, actually. It's really the opposite. What w

Finance committee  I will answer your points quickly. I think you should remember that.... True, the interest rates are low now. Canada actually had, among the advanced countries, one of the shortest-term structures in debt. Actually now moving towards a longer-term structure, I think, is helpful

Finance committee  Well, I think we also have to remember that we're building up debt very quickly, so the base is getting larger. Right now, we're at $1.2 trillion. I've worked out the forecast for 2025, assuming that the $100 billion of extra spending is adopted. We are going to end up having $1.

Finance committee  Oh, it could potentially lead to a debt crisis, but we also have to remember that there could be potentially another bad event happening. A lot of people run these models assuming nothing will ever happen after COVID.

Finance committee  First of all, I think right now if spending was held down for the next number of years, to grow with population and prices as an example, and we were able to deal with some of our other issues that we need to deal with, I think we're okay. However, if we keep running large defic

Finance committee  We have something in the Constitution—section 121—which was intended to try to remove trade barriers. I think we should, but we also have to remember that the federal government itself has some regional policies that interfere with free trade. If you look at the European Union

Finance committee  Yes, the deferred taxes. I think we're going to need to think of serious tax reform. We have a serious competitiveness problem. We're losing capital to other countries. We have our Canadian companies that are investing abroad. We've had poor investment performance. We really have

Finance committee  I think we have to be concerned that we've seen this significant decline in pharmaceutical spending in Canada over the past.... I took that off the ISED website and corrected for inflation and growth in the population, and we've had a significant reduction in per capita spending.

Finance committee  First of all, I think that in the midst of the pandemic—and I actually have said this several times—we should not be increasing any tax at this point. I would suggest that CPP should be delayed, but also I think we should have avoided carbon tax increases and we should have avoid

Finance committee  Actually, I'm pretty well done.

Finance committee  I'll just mention one more, and that is the following. We should make sure that any social policies do not increase our already high marginal tax rates on the working poor due to income-tested programs. This discourages work, education and training, even if the resulting income i

Finance committee  You can hear me now, right?

Finance committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for the invitation from the House of Commons finance committee to appear again. I hope you won't be disappointed. One of the important trends mentioned in the fiscal update that deserve more attention is the effect of the pandemic on structural u

Finance committee  As you said, there is no simple answer. I don't quite agree with some of the things you just said, Mr. Chair, about the investment part and the productivity record. If you go back to the period of 1989 to 1999, we had a terrible record of productivity, absolutely horrible. We wer