Finance committee  I agree. I must say I was struck by the fact that, for a central banker, she was extremely candid and used very stark language. Indeed, as I said in prior remarks, we're over-regulated and we're overtaxed. We've had a monetary and fiscal binge, and we're in trouble. We need to

Finance committee  Yes, I agree. In the perfect textbook world, we teach our first-year students that, yes, there's a case for a carbon tax. If you want to reduce something, you make it costlier or you add a tax. It's called a Pigouvian tax. We're far from the textbook world. We don't even know tha

Finance committee  It really has knock-on effects for every sector of the economy. Given our geography and given that just about everything has to be delivered or transported, including food, people have to drive long distances. We're all going to be paying higher prices, even an urban city dweller

Finance committee  That will certainly deter investment, both domestic and foreign. In my opening remarks, I shared with you the numbers relative to the U.S., which is our benchmark. We have woefully insufficient investment, and if we're going to increase regulations and the cost of investing, that

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. When I was here before this committee last fall, I warned that Canada stood at a crossroads. That is as true now as it was then. If anything, there is greater urgency to fix the problems that ail us. GDP growth per capita, the basic measure of the well-bein

Finance committee  I'd second that. I would say our problems are so structural and so deep-rooted now that a policy tweak here or there won't really make a big difference. We have become a country, sadly, in which entrepreneurship just doesn't thrive, and that's a big problem for us.

Finance committee  I'd add one comment to that. We lived for 10 years or more with basically free money. That distorted the economy beyond belief. It was cheaper to just buy property than to invest in risky assets. We got this huge property market and these asset price bubbles, which is one reason

Finance committee  Yes, indeed. I would echo what we just heard from Mr. Cross. The basic problem is that we have excessive bureaucracy, excessive red tape, a high tax environment and a loose monetary policy. Again, if you look at the data adjusted for the cost of living, per hour, Canada is basica

Finance committee  I'll just make one comment just very briefly, then I'll have Mr. Cross use most of the time. I'll just say that there is a cautionary tale out there, and that's Germany, with a government that has the Greens as one of its coalition partners but has had to walk back from a very

Finance committee  I'll just add to that. Yes, indeed. It's as if the federal government is pressing on the gas and the Bank of Canada is forced to press on the brakes even harder. Interest rates are high, then, in part because we still have massive fiscal deficits. We just haven't learned the le

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just briefly, I'm really perplexed and frankly disturbed that we have not learned the lessons from our mistakes in the seventies and eighties. I think Mr. Cross mentioned—or someone mentioned—the John Crow disinflation, which was extremely painful. We had t

Finance committee  Certainly. I share concerns about this bill and the attempt to alter the competition law of Canada. Keeping in the spirit of my remarks, I think we've really unlearned the lessons that we learned in the 1970s and 1980s. We saw wage and price controls under a previous government i

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Canada's economy today stands at a crossroads. For the last quarter for which we have data, our GDP actually contracted. Inflation just clocked in at 4%, which is still well above the Bank of Canada's target. More rate increases, therefore, could be on the

Finance committee  Yes. That's a one-word answer, Mr. Chair.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, I do think so. I think there would be several benefits to slashing carbon taxes. One, as we've seen, is that we are in a very energy-insecure world. There's a war going on right now in Ukraine, and it teaches us that we can't be complacent about this.