Finance committee  I don't know how much. I've never seen a study quantifying the impact of the carbon tax on investment. The PBO has quantified its impact on household incomes, and GDP and found it to be negative overall. I haven't directly seen a study of investment. I think consensus in the eco

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. First, I would emphasize that productivity isn't worse than it was in the 1930s. We would be living in huts if that were the case. What I said was that GDP growth over the last decade has been the worst since the 1930s. It's still true, what Rogers

Finance committee  Thank you. A consensus is emerging that Canada’s weak economic growth and low productivity constitute a national crisis. It is hard to avoid that conclusion when real GDP growth in the last decade has been the slowest since the 1930s. As population growth surged, real GDP per ca

Finance committee  I really can't. I'm not going to try to devine how this government thinks. I would just note it's the slowest growth over the last 10 years, not 30, as you indicated. What's really important is not how we compare to countries halfway around the world. What's really important is

Finance committee  It's important because population growth by itself automatically increases GDP. People have to eat, have to be housed and have to put clothes on, so automatically, there's going to be more spending and more income from that. What's interesting is that the only two countries that

Finance committee  Yes, one I was talking about was the volume of exports, not the price. The price is not something we control. The fact that the crude oil price goes up is not something that reflects government policy here in Canada. More broadly, I would just say that we tried this approach wi

Finance committee  Yes, very much so. I hate to remind myself that I spent 36 years in government but one thing, now that I have been outside of government for 11 years, is that I can see the difference in the mentality. The mentality of government is to find barriers, to think of problems that do

Finance committee  It's increasing.... It's not government tax rates. It's not government spending, and it's not government deficits. It's this increasing intrusion of this mentality into our society that, to me, is increasing what I'm talking about. I'm looking for reasons. Why has growth stalled

Finance committee  I've read it multiple times.

Finance committee  Thank you for asking because I wanted to get back to Monsieur Ste-Marie about the culpability of economists in the current situation. I think it's much greater than you indicated. I think economists are not honest enough about our shortcomings. I just touched, for example, on h

Finance committee  I have a question I would ask them. That's been the justification we've heard for a lot of government spending over the last 10 years: Child care will pay for itself. Infrastructure spending will pay for itself. My question is this: If these government spending programs pay for

Finance committee  I would never tell a business person how to run their business because it's their money. If they are willing to put their money at risk and they go bust, it's their money and they're not coming to me for reimbursement. The problem is that when it's government money I can't avoid

Finance committee  I'm glad you raised that matter. It goes back to how—if I learned anything in 36 years at Statistics Canada it is this—you cannot understand the world through statistics. They are a very limited way of understanding the world. For example, you talked about gross versus net. I'm

Finance committee  Because of time limitations, I will point people to a paper I recently wrote, published by the Fraser Institute, on the need to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy. Even people like Paul Volcker would say, fundamentally.... Everybody looks at Volcker and says, “Oh, it's monet

Finance committee  There are two problems with the OECD's...and I'm not sure I would criticize them for this. I think they would always note.... People who look at budget deficits always note that Canada has the most decentralized government structure of any of the major G7 nations.