I raised the pension issue because as far as I read in the budget there was $2 billion from surplus dollars that went into the CPP fund to deal with...well, I'm not sure exactly why, because the pension is solvent for another 70 years. I'll come back to that. That's not the main point of my question.
What I'm trying to get at is that there's been general agreement by all sides that we should leave some money aside for contingency and prudence and that in fact it does go against the debt. Nobody quarrels with that. But in this case we're $5 billion over that which is likely to go against the debt, or has gone against the debt. Some would say that's good. As far as I can tell, that brings the debt down from $494 billion--straight math--to $489 billion. I'm trying to understand if you've done any cost-benefit analysis of doing that, which probably reduces the time we pay off our debt by a few seconds in a day, versus the $5 billion that could have been invested using the accepted formula of a trust fund, as we did with the Bill C-48 money, in something like child care.
Maybe I'm getting into political issues, and I shouldn't be asking these questions, but I'd like to know, wouldn't the cost-benefit of putting $5 billion into, say, a child care fund over five years produce a lot more than paying off the debt by that much, which brings the total down a bit but sure doesn't do much to stimulate the economy, grow the economy, and build for a reduction in the debt in the long term?