Finance committee  Unquestionably. Even a bank would say, of course, that's why we're raising interest rates; it is to bring inflation under control.

Finance committee  Undoubtedly. The Bank of Canada gave a briefing on that very subject today.

Finance committee  Do you mean the price of housing or the cost of owning a home? They're two different things.

Finance committee  On the cost of owning a home...yes.

Finance committee  As for groceries, that's one area where I think it's a reach. Food is determined more by supply factors than by demand. I think it's unique in that respect.

Finance committee  It is long overdue that Canada acknowledges its growth crisis and undertakes to create a culture in which innovation flourishes. Thank you.

Finance committee  Thank you. Canada is in the grip of its slowest decade for economic growth since the 1930s. This is evident in the average annual increase of just 0.8% in real GDP per capita over this period. This extended period of almost no growth has widened the gap between per capita growth

Finance committee  Broadly speaking, yes. The problem is, though, that when we tried to apply strict monetarism—this idea of Milton Friedman's that we can replace the central banks by a computer and we'll just increase the money supply by 5%—it didn't work. It ended up with tears in the early eight

Finance committee  Probably in the current situation it's an uncertainty. It's a newness that people don't need to deal with; I think that just getting back to 2%.... The other problem, though—and I would generally go back to my opening statement—is that I'm not at all convinced that.... In fact,

Finance committee  There's no question in the current instance, especially because the Bank of Canada was monetizing that debt. Direct fiscal stimulus became monetary stimulus.

Finance committee  Yes. They bought government bonds.

Finance committee  It's certainly a contributing factor. Another is.... I started the day today watching Bloomberg, as I always do, and they were talking about the sharp rise of the Swiss franc recently, compared to Europe. That obviously has helped keep prices down in Switzerland as well.

Finance committee  You can't draw a one-to-one, necessarily, but there's no question that the low interest rates.... Part of that increase in the money supply was because the Bank of Canada was buying government debt. It was keeping interest rates low. Keeping interest rates low is going to feed in

Finance committee  It's an interesting question. There was a sort of period of panic there in March 2020 when the pandemic was just getting under way. We talked about how we lived in an era of low interest rates, but interest rates, for corporations especially, were starting to rise at that time. P

Finance committee  I don't think there's any question that we should be withdrawing both monetary and fiscal stimulus. Frankly, we should have started withdrawing it a long time ago. It became pretty obvious fairly quickly after the pandemic began that it was not an economy-wide shock; the biggest