And finally, from the Summit for tonight, we have a few more comments from Stephen Harper, the former Canadian Prime Minister.
He was the head of the Canadian Government during the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. That's when global economies took a major hit, very similar to what is taking place right now during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And, just like what's happening now, Governments had to intervene using bail-out policies to rescue the sectors which were most devastated. According to Harper - who is known as an ardent right winger, stimulus type packages are driving up national debt in an unsustainable way. Here's how he explained it during his remarks:
Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, Former PM, Canadian Government
"I tell people this to understand the scale of intervention, if I told my finance minister in my last year of office 2015 to eliminate all taxation, to present to parliament a budget with 0 revenue in 2015, if I had done that, the deficit would have been 1/3 lower than it was last year, that's the scale of intervention and we've gone even further on the monetary side, some very dubious territory and so we're already seeing a return to inflation but it's more than that, unlike during the global financial crisis, leaders, particularly G20 leaders this time seem largely unconcerned about how they will exit from these policies. Many in fact are saying these are the policies on which they are going to govern on an ongoing basis and I can tell you that if that is true, the consequences are going to be a rude awakening. Countries that do not have an exit plan from this that do not have a realistic private sector growth plan, they going to have real serious difficulties. There will be in some of those countries real possibility of sovereign debt crisis, I can't predict where and when but it is certain that those will occur, just as by the way extraordinary intervention on a much smaller scale saw many sovereign debt crisis last time. As that aside, I want to congratulate the government here for being seized with this issue and for renegotiating it's debt structure early and proactively, congratulations. But in many places, I can tell you the political management of things like large scale deficits are going to be a central issue in short order and they're going to be a central issue in what was already a very challenging political environment before the pandemic."
