Finance committee  Well, it clearly has over the last year. It doesn't always, but in the last year there's no question.... The Bank of Canada has been purchasing government bonds. It has been monetizing that debt. It has been doing that to keep interest rates low and allow the government to contin

Finance committee  I'm sorry. Your screen froze for a second. Before I get to recommendations, I would add that the situation is even more complicated than we have portrayed it up to now, because of the pandemic. You may have noticed it was highly publicized in La Presse recently and some other pa

Finance committee  As I mentioned at the beginning, there's no question that you can't have inflation without an expansion of the money supply. The problem is that it's not a one-to-one relationship. You can't say that if the money supply increases x per cent, you're going to get y per cent inflati

Finance committee  First of all, let's go back to what I mentioned about the Bank for International Settlements. They've been warning about asset price inflation basically ever since the great financial crisis of 2008. That includes Canada. Housing prices in this country exploded when the Bank of C

Finance committee  Well, there's no question. Because of high immigration rates and historically low interest rates, we've done everything possible to boost demand, and we weren't conscious of whether supply could possibly adjust to meet that. The result has been this explosive increase in prices.

Finance committee  I'm not sure I follow the question.

Finance committee  Okay, I think I know where you're going with this. Obviously, most of the value has been captured by people already owning existing homes. It's not going into the construction of new homes. It's not going into the value-added chain. It's been captured as higher prices by existi

Finance committee  That's an interesting point. There was a lot of talk about Canada being a petrocurrency, particularly during the run-up of the dollar to parity in the 2000s. Over the last year, we've seen oil prices recover substantially, from record lows to $85 or $86 a barrel. Then you look at

Finance committee  Yes, unquestionably. There's something like one third of the CPI that's imported, so there's going to be a direct impact there, particularly in highly visible areas like food and energy.

Finance committee  I don't think there's any question that it had a contributing and large role. I think Mr. Perrault put his finger on part of the problem. In this country, the federal government operates a lot of the levers that control housing demand, notably through interest rates and immigrati

Finance committee  That's particularly a problem at the local level. It seems to be especially a problem in areas like Toronto and Vancouver, where land is constrained or contained to certain areas. The local governments have been reluctant to increase supply, but we've also seen demand increase sh

Finance committee  Again, I don't think there's any question. There's been an attempt to tighten those rules, to increase down payments, to impose stress tests to see if people can afford their mortgages at higher interest rates. People have been able to find other sources of finance, particularly

Finance committee  Thank you. Most analysts discuss inflation with an air of precision and certainty. I would like to speak about the uncertainty and the unknown surrounding our understanding and measurement of inflation. I'm passing on note that I worked at Statistics Canada for 36 years, ending

Finance committee  Thank you for the correction. As I was saying, the U.S. and Canada treat housing differently, and both nations have changed their measure of housing prices since the 1980s. There's no right or wrong in this, but it reflects that a discretion of judgment is involved. Fourth, the

Finance committee  Yes, that's what I said.