BDL Ep7 feat Trevor Tombe Transcript
SPEAKERS
Trevor Tombe, Marwa Abdou
Marwa Abdou 00:00
Let me ask you a question. Can you tell me why fiscal policy matters, or how the fiscal divide between Canada and the US impacts economic stability? Even I, as an educated economist, often find that I need to go back and re examine the fundamentals and think about how it's all connected. How many of you are parents or homeowners, our consumers work for run or own businesses. Did you know that if you answered yes to any one of these questions, you'd be significantly impacted by fiscal policy? Everyone is but very few of us can understand how it works, let alone explain it in simple terms. This fiscal year, Canada had a projected deficit of $48.3 billion which roughly translates to 1.6% of its GDP. That is, we're spending more than we are bringing in revenue. By contrast, the United States is looking at a projected budget deficit of $1.9 trillion that's roughly 6.2% of the US as GDP, despite this gap, Canada isn't immune to fiscal pressures. I mean, hello. Have we been paying attention? That's why we're seeing so much debate over rising healthcare costs and aging population and concerns about business competitiveness and how the government is going to approach spending. And to top it all off, we're all wondering how the US is economic instability could spill over, affecting the trade and investment climate at home. But why does the budget need to be balanced? And does a balanced budget really matter? Listen, I don't have all the answers, and trust me, if there's someone who can give them to you and explain how it matters to all Canadians. You want today's guests to be at the top of that list.
Welcome to the Business data lab podcast, Canada's Economy Explained. I'm your host. Marwa Abdou. Today's guest is the Trevor Tombe,professor of economics at the University of Calgary and director of fiscal and economic policy at the School of Public Policy. Trevor is a leading expert in international trade, public finances and fiscal federalism. He is also a co director of finances of the nation, a research initiative that provides data and analysis on Canadian public finances. In addition to his academic work, he contributes regularly to the hub.ca where he recently published an article titled, Canada's federal deficit is worrying, but it's nowhere near the fiscal crisis the US is facing before we dive in some background and context, we recorded this episode as part of a series at the inaugural BDL conference we held in Ottawa a few weeks ago, and while a new prime minister has since been elected, I had asked Trevor about what we should be thinking about when weighing out economic platforms between election candidates, and his answer still holds a lot of food for thought. If, while you're listening, you find yourself wondering what Trevor's take is, particularly on the liberal party's fiscal platform. He has been sharing his incisive views on the hub.ca we'll also link those articles in the show notes. One other thing in our conversation, Trevor mentions the idea of instituting a royal commission a few times, for those scratching their heads, it is a formal, independent entity that looks into questions of sizable public concern. Canada is no stranger to this. One notable example is the Royal Commission on the economic union and development prospects for Canada, also known as the McDonald Commission. It was established in 1982 to explore questions pertaining to Canada's future economic prospects. It looked into the effectiveness of its political institutions and the performance of Canada's economy. It also investigated concerns about inflation, unemployment, low productivity growth in the nation's political process. The McDonald commission was considered by many a rare success in that it made noteworthy contributions to public policy and its recommendations, particularly its advocacy for a free trade agreement with the United States significantly and meaningfully influenced Canadian trade policy, or at least it did. Fun fact, the Commission took roughly three years to complete, and cost the government, at the time, ten million which would be equivalent to 30 million in today's dollars. It was one of the most expensive and largest inquisitions in Canadian history to that date. Now let's get moving. I started this conversation with Trevor with the basics why fiscal policy matters, and particularly when we're looking at the economic health of a country and how it's connected to economic stability. Important stuff. Here we go.
Trevor Tombe 04:39
Sure, so there's a lot there to unpack, and that one question, wow, public finances and fiscal policy in general is is one of the most important areas of public policy, just because almost any program you have in mind, whether it's health, education, environmental protection, what have you, the entire legal system, everything requires public. Funds to support that. That means that we need to think about how we raise public funds, either taxation on income or consumption or borrowing. In recent years, at least federally, we have had a gap between total programs spending by the federal government and the revenues through taxation and other sources to fund it. So there has been borrowing, and that's what the deficit is, just this annual gap between spending and revenues in recent budgets, not only is that deficit present, and some have concerns about it, but it's also been so if you look at the budget last year, they were expecting the deficit for this year to be about 40 billion. And so the 48 that you noted in in in the introductory comments, there is an increase of about 20% in the size of that budget. And next year, the previous budget anticipating 39 billion in deficit. Now most recent estimates in the fall economic statement a couple of months ago, revises that up to a little over 42 billion. So the deficits are present and growing, and so that for some is a source of concern, because as you borrow more than the amount that you owe naturally rises, and that means that interest costs will increase, and interest costs on our past borrowing is something that has been gradually rising about 47 billion in March of 2024 now expected to be about 54 billion in March of 2025 so that means that we are potentially crowding out our ability to expand public spending and public services in other areas, because now financial resources are going towards interest on the accumulated debt, or it means that taxes are higher than they otherwise could be. And so this kind of matters for the amount of space that the government has available to it to pursue other objectives in the future, and I think about right now, during the election, we're seeing, and we'll likely see many more commitments to come. We're kind of recording this only shortly after the election started, so we haven't had a whole lot, but we have had commitments around personal income tax reductions, for example, with a one point drop proposed by the Liberals for the first tax bracket, a two and a quarter point drop proposed by the Conservatives for that same bracket. And the cost there for the liberals, about 5 billion estimate and about 11 billion for the conservatives. And those are funds that also or foregone funds, I should say, in the case of a tax cut that come at the expense in the future of potentially spending more in other areas or having larger tax cuts than we could have had if our debt was a little bit lower than it is. So there's a trade off when we engage in borrowing, and that's really because of the mounting size of of interest payments on the debt. And so I think it's an important debate to be had, especially because there are a lot of longer term challenges that we face. I think demographics and rising health costs, that's a very considerable one, mainly for provincial governments than the feds, although there's old age security and rising spending on elderly benefits federally. But also now, in the kind of new world order that we find ourselves in where security is a greater concern and renewed commitments to expand military capacity here and elsewhere, that's not cheap, and so increasing spending in that area will also mean we need to have the fiscal capacity to do that now, long term, I think the federal government is actually in a pretty good position. While the debt is growing, because we're borrowing each year, it's growing a little bit more slowly than the economy itself, and so in a sense, it's growing more slowly than our ability to manage and pay for that debt. Reasonable people will disagree about whether debt relative to GDP, is falling fast enough, and that's an interesting debate, but if we look south of the border, situation is completely different. They're borrowing way more than Canada is you mentioned at the top this 6.2% deficit that they're running in this single year. If Canada had a deficit of the same scale, we'd be talking about a deficit of about $200 billion rather than the 48 their debts growing right? And it's growing much, much quicker than the economy itself. And so their debt to GDP well in excess now of 100% whereas Canada's is about 42 so much more difficult for them. Interest costs now in the United States exceed what they spend in the military. Like it's a big cost there, and that creates real risks. And one way that governments borrow is they issue bonds. And the willingness of lenders or investors to purchase those bonds depends on what they think the risks are, and they'll charge for risks if they think that they are growing. And that's exactly what we're seeing. The cost of the US government borrowing right now has been much higher than what we see in Canada, and this gap between what we can borrow at and what they can borrow at is growing, indeed, earlier this month, it's at levels that we have never seen in Canadian history, least since 1870 so we have some really good data since 1870 on this and this gap between us and them is wider than it's ever been. We borrow now at about 1.2% lower than them, lower interest than them, and in part, because of the fiscal risks that they face.
Marwa Abdou 10:51
Why do you think that there's this growing gap between how the two countries are borrowing at and why has it greater than it has been ever? I think
Trevor Tombe 11:02
I think primarily it is about the risks that come with the US debt levels and the need to change fiscal policy in the States, combined with political system that might not lead to the kind of difficult decisions required to write their fiscal ship, we're seeing that in credit rating agencies that evaluate the credit worthiness of different government bonds around the country and those reviewing the United States have recently noted that, in part, some of the political challenges that the federal government in the US has is In part why there are risks. Think about the regular occurrences around whether or not the US government is even going to pay interest on its debt like we have several times now in recent years, gotten really close to a moment where the US federal government might have actually defaulted on some of its interest payments like that's a really unusual situation, and says something about their underlying ability to change fiscal policy. Now, the US economy is strong. They have the ability to raise public funds they wish, or change spending levels like there's really strong fundamentals there. It's just that the politics are such that it's really difficult to make these big decisions around taxes and and spending, and so instead of having like we're seeing that right now with the department on on government efficiency, so I don't want to evaluate against them politically. What you know, whether it's it's good or bad in a normative sense, but it's certainly not the kind of organized approach to fiscal policy through a legislative budget process that we historically have seen, because they have pretty low confidence in their ability to get such bills passed through both the House of Representatives and and the Senate. And so the there's real risks there.
Marwa Abdou 12:59
Now we touched on a lot of kind of the US is increasing debt and fiscal uncertainty. How do you think that that's going to play out in terms of Canada's trade and investment climate?
Trevor Tombe 13:13
Yeah, tough question, because there's so much beyond fiscal policy that matters for trade and investment in Canada. Think about the uncertainty that we face, that businesses face in Canada right now. We don't know what tariff levels are going to be in the future, and that makes it really difficult for companies thinking of expanding or investing in a facility that is primarily geared to producing and exporting Canada. So the last several months have been an enormous challenge. And there are different measures of uncertainty, one that I really like that's publicly available at policy uncertainty.com so I'd encourage people to go there. So group of really strong researchers in the states have produced these indices for lots of different countries and have linked these measures of uncertainty to all sorts of outcomes, business investment and labor market outcomes, economic growth, things like that. Since the spikes in uncertainty, it will come as no surprise our bet for the economy, right? But what we're seeing in Canada is a spike in uncertainty at least as of February 2025 that we have never seen before. Never, ever, is ever since this index started, started being tracked in the in the 1980s which is far enough it is. And so we're about 500% higher uncertainty in this index than we were a year ago. And that's an increase in uncertainty beyond any other country, of about the two countries about the two dozen that they track. So uncertainty is higher around the world, and trade policy uncertainty around the world higher than ever has been recorded as well, for the simple reason that trade policy in the United States is in a period of flux right now, where even, I think it's fair to say the administration itself, it might not have fully decided for its. Self what it wants trade policy to be. There are a lot of competing and mutually inconsistent objectives on the part of different people within the US administration, so we might land in very different places, depending on how that internal debate works its way through. But because there's potentially large tariffs affecting most countries around the world that trade with the United States that that's a real problem, but it's an especially large problem for a small, open economy like Canada, where so much economic activity and millions of jobs are directly tied to our trade with the United States, not just exports, but we purchase a lot of intermediate inputs that our businesses use to make the goods and services that that we buy even domestically, right? So our economies are so deeply intertwined that tariffs on the order of 10 or 25% or or whatever they happen to be, are incredibly, potentially damaging. And so this spike in uncertainty alone is likely to lead to a slowdown or drop in business investment. And researchers that look at this index of uncertainty in some of their academic work link it to, or, I should say, Link past spikes to business investment and labor market outcomes. And if the historical relationships hold. Then the spike in uncertainty that we're observing right now in Canada, at least as of February 2025 would typically be associated with a drop of this drop in business investment on the order of about 25% that's massive, and the rise in the unemployment rate by about one full percentage point just from the uncertainty spike alone, and so this alone might be something that is sufficient to cause a recession, independent of whether the tariffs actually occur or not, and if they do occur, and April 2, so called Liberation Day, has not yet arrived, so it's unclear at the moment what these tariffs will be, but if they do happen, then, of course, further slow Canada's economy. And that's, I think, a much, much more important, at least short term feature of the economy today than anything about fiscal policy, either in the US or in Canada.
Marwa Abdou 17:14
A lot of that is very, very sobering, as you said. You know, in this current moment in time, where, when we're recording, we're on pins and needles, kind of waiting for April 2 to see what's going to take place. Stats Can data tells us that the trade deficit in goods has widened from point $6 billion in 2023 to $6.9 billion in 2024 with all of this building trade tension that's happening, you know, in real time, what is Canada doing, and what can Canada continue to do to protect itself economically.
Trevor Tombe 18:01
Great question. I think maybe I'll separate two parts of that question, first, about the trade deficits. That's an interesting one, because most people have the view that trade deficits are a negative and that if trade deficits are large, that is a sign of weakness in in the economy. That's certainly a view that President Trump expresses quite regularly, and trade deficits are something that he hopes to address through tariff policies. Now, I think for a country like Canada, especially a country like Canada who's long had a flexible exchange rate, trade balances are largely irrelevant if we have, for example, a incredibly strong economy that everyone in the world wants to be a part of, and we have capital flowing in from abroad and massive international investments that itself is it will increase demand for the Canadian dollar, and That will make imports, from our perspective cheaper, and exports from the perspective of those abroad more expensive. And so that big inflow of capital would tend to cause an expansion of a trade deficit, right? And so in that case, the trade deficit would be a sign of deep economic strength. And so it's not enough just to look at the trade balance and conclude there's, there's a problem, and I think that's in part, what the US is experiencing. They have a high value dollar. They have with many countries, a trade deficit precisely because they are a very strong and attractive economy to invest in. So they have large capital inflows, right? So trade balances, yeah, they matter. They create an international balance of payments, in or or out. But there's also the financial or capital account to remember, investment dollars also flow in and out and in aggregate payments balance perfectly. And that's a feature of any country that has a flexible exchange rate. So it overall, we don't have a deficit or a surplus. When you look at flows all in this is also, in part, important in the current debate between Canada and the United States. Like, yeah, they do have a trade deficit with Canada. It's about $100 billion in at least in 2023 but investment flows are lopsided. So in investment from the US into Canada in 2023 was about $150 billion but from Canada to the US was about $400 billion there's a lot of capital flowing out of Canada into the United States. And overall, the balance of payments all in is hugely in favor of the US. So when the President says that they are subsidizing Canada by just looking at the trade balance, you know that misses the fact that we invest way more in the stays than the reverse. And so the dollars are disproportionately flowing into the United States. It's just like something missed, and I think, something that many are not fully aware of, and potentially a consequence of some of the mounting challenges that Canada's had around productivity growth and economic strength in over many years now the latter half of your question, and I know I'm a very long winded answer, but what can Canada do to protect its economy? Well, there's not a lot that we can do about the tariffs beyond, of course, active engagement, not just between governments, but between businesses on both sides of the border, leaders here engaging with leaders in the US through chambers of commerce, importantly, and other organizations to advocate for free and open trade between the two economies. But what we can control is domestic policy, not international policy, and I think the focus ought to be on ensuring that we take steps within Canada to boost the investment climate, boost productivity, boost growth through our own policy choices, and I think that's why we're seeing governments have a lot of renewed attention paid to issues like interprovincial trade. We're seeing political leaders also not just talking about that, but around the need to ease regulatory burdens, or some provinces even accelerating them. I think about British Columbia's move to accelerate certain resource projects there. So if we can take steps to strengthen our own economy, then that will make us more resilient to external shocks that we can't directly control. Now, whether we retaliate or not, I think that's a separate conversation in that retaliation does hurt the Canadian economy, right? But there might be non economic communications benefits to it, you know, especially with targeted tariffs on certain politically sensitive goods in the US, maybe that helps facilitate our political leaders going on major news networks in the United States to make the case. And so if there's a PR benefit of retaliatory tariffs, then it might be an economic cost worth paying. But we really shouldn't go too big on tariffs. That'll just further slow our own economy and worsen our own productivity challenges.
Marwa Abdou 23:14
You raise a lot of points, particularly in terms of how Canada's deficit, you know, compares to the US and some of our policy approach in terms of relative to the US. Now, something that I picked up is that in between the lines, you're essentially saying that Canada can't afford to be complacent. So what are the fiscal risks that you know Canada should be closely watching, and for our listeners who are kind of keeping their eye out to the election and how that's playing out, if you were advising listeners, what are some of the things they should be attuned to in terms of Looking at what candidates are proposing.
Trevor Tombe 24:01
So good questions. A couple things there. So economically, the productivity challenge that we've had in Canada is is hard to understate. So if we look at what productivity growth has been, and one broad measure of this is the amount of GDP per hour that we're producing. So each hour that you work, how many goods and services are we on average getting out of that hour worked? And productivity gains are about getting more for less. It's not about working harder for a lower wage. So higher productivity means higher incomes and purchasing power for most individuals within Canada, and that's slowed dramatically in the last decade to about point 2% a year, compared to the 20 previous years, where it averaged about one and a half percent a year. So we've grown as much in terms of labor productivity in the past decade as we used to grow in the typical year. Meanwhile, other economies have not experienced. Its same slowdown. So over the past decade, we've increased GDP per capita and in Canada by the second slowest pace in the OECD. And had the historical norm of us being aligned with the US like typically, for those 20 years between the mid 90s and 2015 we would grow up and down with the economy of the United States, almost perfectly identical average per year growth over that time. And had those historical patterns just continued, the economy today would be about 18% larger than it is. That's about $600 billion or so in foregone economic activity, much larger loss economically than anything that this trade war is going to deliver absolutely just slower moving and so easier to perhaps not react as strongly to. So there are challenges in Canada, no question, and our focus should be on reversing that and closing that gap that has widened between us in the United States through policy improvements, on taxes, on regulations, on on the investment climate, all in so I tend to be a fan of like a Royal Commission that does a deep dive into this kind of stuff. But anyway, that's aside fiscally though. Let's turn to finances. But we talked about the difference between Canada and the United States, and their situation in the States is completely unsustainable. The federal government in Canada is lucky in that its finances, despite the deficit, is sustainable in a technical sense that the debt will grow more slowly than the economy. The debt to GDP is projected to fall both by the government itself and it reports this in the budget, but also independent analysis by the parliamentary budget office, my own work that's available publicly through finances of the nation.ca, one word also showing declining federal debt to GDP, just because, structurally, most federal revenue grows with the economy, right taxes on income and consumption is basically the whole ball game for revenue, whereas spending, a lot of it is transfers to people in provinces that are tied to these formulas that, on average, grow more slowly than the economy. So structurally, federal revenue is set to grow more quickly than spending. So I don't see a lot of risk there. I think it'd be prudent for us to lower the debt to GDP faster than is currently being projected, because public debt is one nice shock absorber that we have to deal with uncertain developments. And I think it's fair to say the world will be uncertain for many years to come, and so we should more aggressively return debt levels back when we can to where we had it, for example, prior to COVID, provinces are where the real financial risks are in Canada. And we can't ignore provinces. It's a federal election. And so of course, right now there'll be a lot of focus on federal policy. But you know, we are a very decentralized Federation, all in provinces and local governments account for about 70% of total government spending in Canada, and this is among the largest sub national expenditure shares the entire OECD. So we're very decentralized provincial and local governments in aggregate, least from a public finance perspective, it's fair to say, are more important than the federal government, but don't get as much attention, and there we have massive financial challenges ahead because of aging populations and healthcare. There's a lot of focus now on healthcare systems in many provinces that are straining fair to sale and in a lot of parts of the country, emergency rooms are feature regular closures on weekends, for example, because of staffing issues. Just imagine what the pressures are going to be 10 years from now, when the share of the 65 plus population is even larger than today. So provinces have not yet grappled not only with the current challenges facing the healthcare system, but the ones that are 1020, years down the road, and projections vary, but we could, just through demographics alone and typical past patterns of health cost increases be looking at rising healthcare Spending on the order of about two to 3% of GDP by about 2050 and that might not sound like a lot, that's a massive increase in spending, basically equivalent to somewhere between five to 10% of the general sales tax if we were to pay for through tax increases alone, which would probably be imprudent. We should think more structurally about how to do things differently, but that's where the real financial challenges are, the real fiscal risks and the risks that not getting a lot of attention.
Marwa Abdou 29:49
Which provinces are in better spots and which ones are in perhaps worse spots?
Trevor Tombe 29:56
Grat question. So we're not only decentralized, but we're. Also very diverse, with economic and fiscal circumstances that are very different in one part of the country to another. And the real challenges long term here are in those provinces that are both older on average, or, I should say, whose populations are older than average and who are aging more quickly. And the Atlantic provinces, Newfoundland and Labrador in particular, do have demographics that are more challenging to deliver critical public services like health care, and that does mean maybe we do need to think differently about how federal provincial transfers are structured. Part of the reason why demographics are less favorable in some parts of the country is because younger workers move elsewhere. And if you have an outflow of young people from a province, well, you then that province paid for their education, and now they've taken their human capital and they've gone somewhere else, and the the provinces then left with an older population that it would have had lost a tax paying working age individual. And so that kind of amplifies the challenges financially for the government to deliver health care in those regions, because it doesn't tax the workers who left your tax based on where you live, meanwhile, those young workers might go back home when they're older, and that's not uncommon. And so that means that the province paid for their education, lost out on income tax revenue while they were a worker, but then pays for their health care when they return later in life. And so only the federal government is able to bridge that challenge, because they're going to collect tax revenue from this worker regardless of where they happen to live. And right now, no major federal transfer incorporates demographics into it. And so every now and then, actually, I think the last two now that I think about the last two federal elections have featured proposals by parties to change the Canada Health Transfer to one that's a function of older individuals, rather than population as a whole. It's also something that British Columbia was pushing for some time ago under premier Clark, I guess a decade or more ago now. It's a policy proposal that I think is worth thinking about, worth exploring, because there are some big challenges for some provinces that are much higher than the challenges for others.
Marwa Abdou 32:26
Why hasn't that come to fruition then? Well, federal
Trevor Tombe 32:30
transfers are a really difficult area. Politically, it's hard to imagine changing the formula for any transfer in such a way that doesn't result in fewer dollars going to some provinces, unless the federal government is willing to increase the scale of the transfers overall. And so you have this issue of potentially creating winners and losers, unless the Feds want to dramatically increase the amount of total transfers that it's providing to provinces, and in that case, you just be growing them more quickly to some provinces than others. That would be politically easier. But where's the fiscal room federally for that to come from if we're also in need of expanding spending in other areas, like federal government is exposed to rising Old Age Security from an old an older and aging population, but military spending alone is going to be a potentially sizable demand on the federal government, and transfers to provinces might just be a lower priority.
Marwa Abdou 33:35
That's a lot of things to juggle simultaneously. So based on your research, and you know, you track data, you look at you know, what's been happening over a period of time, what can we learn from periods where Canada has done a better job in terms of prioritizing how it maintains its fiscal stability, versus perhaps now, and how can we move back to a competitive economy?
Trevor Tombe 34:08
Great question, and this lets me bring back my royal commission point, which I am completely serious about. I mean, throughout Canadian history, we have obviously had lots of moments in the past where we've had difficult, economic challenges, social challenges, political challenges, and at least financially, especially the Fed Prov dynamic that we've been talking about, those come and go, but from the very beginning, Canada was born in the midst of a separatist movement in Nova Scotia, the anti confederates, led by Joseph Howe there, and they have many concerns, but one of the biggest concerns was around finances and federal prevention transfers and these kind of pressures come and go throughout Canadian history, and so they'll always be a part of what we face. And so in part, I think that perspective is useful, that there's nothing new right now about. The challenges we face, just about managing and balancing competing pressures, and how we tend to do it. And this will oversimplify but we tend to address challenges through one off ad hoc adjustments to deal with the expediency of the moment, if you will. But as those ad hoc one off fixes, if you will, accumulates. Then the system becomes gradually less coherent. Then what the government historically does is it does a deep dive into the structure, redesigns the whole thing, wipes away the old system and replaces it with a new, freshly designed one. So we historically do this through royal commissions we've done in the past, the Royal Sierra walk commission from the 1930s comes to mind is like a really big one. We also approached them through kind of joint federal provincial committees, if you will. One in the early 1980s was a task force of parliamentarians that were from all the parties that were given this job of thinking about redesigning the system more recently, with respect to equalization, it was an expert panel that was struck to do it. But whatever structure it takes, it's it's usually a group of individuals that are not directly involved in in cabinet or government. Sometimes they're elected, sometimes they're not elected, folks, but they're given the space to do a deep dive issue some recommendations that consistently the government then tends to adopt, even in the case of our more recent changes to things like equalization, a really difficult program politically to manage. We had an expert panel struck by Paul Martin, reported after the 2006 change in government to Stephen Harper, who largely adopted almost all of the recommendations in that expert panel. And so it's a moment where something like that might be important. I think about the last big economic Royal Commission we've had was the McDonald commission in the 1980s and this led to big changes in economic policy. It was perhaps one of the main motivators for the Canada us free trade agreement itself. It led to big tax changes that dramatically improved the investment and economic environment in Canada and made lots of other recommendations as well. And that commission was struck following inflationary periods in the 1970s really challenging times economically as well, and we've gone through now in recent years, a lot of economic challenges that might require us do a deep rethink of how policy works, how things are structured, not just recent inflation, not just disruptions from COVID, but challenges ahead, with demographics, challenges with an unreliable trading partner south of the border, which I think, independent of the President, there is perhaps a new reality that we need to grapple with and empowering a group like like Royal Commission to do a deep dive. Really think about what the options are, what the constraints are that we face, make some recommendations that are cool headed and independent of the political pressures that governments face, and of course, not all the recommendations will be adopted, and that's fine, but that's the kind of thing that I think is required, and historically has been required, to point Canada's economy in a better direction.
North?
Up!
Marwa Abdou 38:15
Trevor, thank you so much for these invaluable insights. For our listeners, be sure to head to hub.ca to read Trevor's articles. We will make sure to link a lot of these resources in the show notes. I know that many of you are tuned to his publications, which are also found on his website trevortombe.com. You can also visit the business data labs resources and check out the latest data on trade and economic trends until next time. Thank you for listening.
Outro 38:52
Thanks for listening to Canada's Economy Explained. Follow us for updates and visit businessdatalab.ca for free tools and insights and be sure to join us next time.