Finance committee  My top recommendation for budget 2022 is around the bank tax. I think the bank tax should be avoided at this moment in time; I don't think it will be helpful for growth. At this point, we're looking for as much productive growth as we can.

Finance committee  Yes. There are two parts to it: increased competition and increased productivity. In both senses, what you're trying to do, in the case of competition, is to force the incumbents to offer lower prices, but in the case of productivity, you're improving your ability to produce thin

Finance committee  That is the problem. When slack's been fully absorbed in an economy, if you're adding additional pressures on it, you are going to get upward pressures on inflation. The Governor of the Bank of Canada was clear that, despite not increasing interest rates last week, interest rate

Finance committee  I probably should have been more careful with my wording around “zero-cost”. It's productivity-enhancing at minimal cost, at least, in the sense that you are letting the private sector do the work. You have all these fintechs that would benefit immensely from access to the data t

Finance committee  Mr. Stewart, I could add one quick point to that, around misses. If you're missing certain targets you had put in place in the budget, explain why that's happening when you do your updates. COVID threw a lot of the projections, at least of the budget that predated it, off cours

Finance committee  Yes. What I said was that the federal government can prod lower levels of government in areas of the approval process, such as the rules around density and the way they charge development fees. I can expand on those, if you'd like.

Finance committee  The C.D. Howe Institute paper was published by an individual. Neither Mark nor I wrote that paper. However, the fiscal accountability papers in general are based on a series of measures, a variety of measures: transparency, how close you stick to what you say you're going to do,

Finance committee  I think you always find it alarming when anyone is ranked at the bottom when some of the issues concern transparency.

Finance committee  The focus continues to be on that paper, which neither of us wrote. To answer your question, there was a budget tabled last year. That would have markedly changed the rankings, because not having one certainly affected the ones you're discussing. You're moving in that direction

Finance committee  Thanks, Mark. I'll add my thanks to the chair and the committee as well for the invite here today. It's always an honour to be asked. I'm going to touch on three topics very briefly and I'm happy to expand on any of them in the Q and A. I'll talk about inflation, the housing m

Finance committee  This was part of our monetary and financial measures working group that we put together. The comment there was less about the epidemiological perspective, as Ian mentioned earlier, and demographics and how vulnerable people should be self-isolating, and more about thinking about

Finance committee  I'll admit that that's not the direction I thought you were going to go with the question. The government's made it very clear that net zero is going to define its thinking, and it's something that it wants to achieve. I understand the arguments about not wanting government to p

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to all the committee members for inviting me to be part of the panel here today. These are obviously extraordinary times, and the response by the government and the central bank has been equally extraordinary. They don't have a playbook for this