Finance committee  Yes, when we talk about the market debt, the $1 trillion, we include the NHA MBS.

Finance committee  Yes. That debt is backed against....

Finance committee  It's backed against mortgages, yes, exactly. There are assets behind that.

Finance committee  It's true; it's backed against assets.

Finance committee  That is correct.

Finance committee  The total debt numbers we are using are as a result of the new borrowing authority framework the government put in place in 2017. The objective was to be more transparent, and therefore we wanted to include all our debt, all the debt the government needs to finance on the market.

Finance committee  First, I'd like to clarify that when you referred to the $1-trillion market debt, it also takes into consideration the debt of the crown corporations. You need to distinguish the federal debt, or the debt of the federal government by itself—which is about $700 billion right now—and you need to add about $330 billion to capture the crown's debt.

Finance committee  The liabilities, we could finance them if we want. It's only that we finance as we go. It's mostly linked to a pension plan. Basically, every year we need to pay more than what we receive in some cases, so that's why we finance it on an annual basis and we don't pre-fund those liabilities.

Finance committee  Right now, I could say that the average interest rate that we pay on our debt is 1.2%, so the interim interest payment in terms of billions of dollars I think is around $13 billion that we will need to pay.

Finance committee  I don't know what you're referring to.

Finance committee  That's information we can find in the budget right now in terms of deficit projection.

Finance committee  Yes, we weren't doing any ultra-long, as we call it—we were not doing any 50-year bonds before.

Finance committee  For example, this year we're going to be issuing in terms of 10-years, $15-billion debt, relative to about $4.5 billion in the 30-years.

Finance committee  Exactly.

Finance committee  The share is fairly equal, because the 10-year will come to maturity after 10 years and the 30-year will last a lot longer, so you can issue a lot less of the 30-year ones in order to have the same proportion of debt that's been issued with a maturity of 10 years. I don't have the exact figure, but looking at the number based on what we are issuing this year, I'll assume it's roughly the same.