Due to the sacrifice of Canadians and the foresight of successive governments, our public debt burden was the lowest in the G-7. Thanks to the courage of my predecessors, monetary policy had tremendous credibility. Due to the quality of public supervision and private risk management, our banks had one of the soundest capital bases in the world.
At the same time, a cross-check of the outcome of the economic analysis with that of the monetary analysis confirms that the underlying pace of monetary expansion has remained strong but has continued to show further signs of deceleration.