Finance committee  I think you're right. We have seen.... The recovery so far, if I can call it a “recovery”, or the period during which measures of output have gone back toward normal, has outpaced all of the forecasts that were laid out last year, in fact all the way up until Christmas, and not j

Finance committee  Perhaps the question is offered in a very abstract way, but I can just say that Canada has, if not the fairest, one of the fairest tax structures across the OECD. There is an easily available summary of statistics on the OECD website of its cross-country analysis. I'm not saying

Finance committee  Well, I hope you don't mind if I take exception to your question. When we went through a shock the size that we did, a lot of prices fell. I'll give you an example. I went down to Toronto back in November to do a televised thing. I stayed at the Sheraton in Toronto for $169. I'd

Finance committee  I'm not going to comment on that. When the price of the hotel room goes back up to $269 or whatever it goes up to, you would call it inflation. But I'm saying it's just a return to more normal pricing and it measures as inflation. It's transitory, because when prices go up, unl

Finance committee  I am not going to answer questions that are actually questions for the Governor of the Bank of Canada. I am not the Governor of the Bank of Canada. But what I will explain is that when prices go down and then they go back up again, that so-called inflation stays in the inflation

Finance committee  Of course there are many risks. As you indicated, we've never been here before, so the signposts that we're reading are not as reliable as usual. I can say flippantly not to worry about inflation; inflation depends on demand and supply and it always has, but we don't know for sur

Finance committee  Skills and training investments ensure that we get the matches we need. We mentioned some shortages before. There are easy-to-identify shortages in the workforce. I think this is going to become a larger problem as we go through and exit from the pandemic. You've probably heard

Finance committee  That last part is hard to say. Of course, it depends on the vaccinations, the success of the vaccinations, whether there's a way forward and those kinds of things. I really have no way of forecasting that. Again, I emphasize the elasticity of the programs that were set up so tha

Finance committee  I hope so, too.

Finance committee  What I want to clarify is that StatsCan captures the cost of living in a home in your consumer price index—of course it does—and, importantly, that includes not just the price of a house but also the cost of servicing the mortgage that goes with it. If you look at charts that sho

Finance committee  Agreed.

Finance committee  First, in my remarks, I indicated that there's twice as much potential economic growth in harmonizing trade barriers across provinces as there is in the child care initiative. The best empirical work conducted by a professor from the University of Calgary, along with people at t

Finance committee  It's a highly hypothetical question, isn't it? To me, the sorts of policies that have been put in place around the world post-COVID all look to people as if they would be inflationary, but what they are doing is counteracting an enormous deflationary force to keep us roughly wh

Finance committee  If that premise is wrong, then the economy will show signs of being much stronger sooner than expected, and those very same elastic policies that we talked about will immediately retreat and reduce the amount of stimulus that is being delivered. That's the beauty of the automatic

Finance committee  I think it is fairly structural. It's not just a short-term cyclical thing. What we have are very important structural changes in the economy that are giving rise to persistent excess demand in the trades— construction trades. We know we're going to be building infrastructure hea