I gather that this Saturday we will reach a real milestone. Bill Morneau will become the trillion-dollar man, as Canada will reach a trillion dollars in borrowing at the end of this week.
Now, the government has talked a lot about its new debt promise, distinct from the old one. The old one was that they would balance the budget by 2019 and that the deficit would never exceed $10 billion. The new one is just that the debt-to-GDP ratio at a federal level will decline.
I want to ask you whether that measurement is really complete if we're trying to determine what level of debt the Canadian economy can withstand. The federal government is one level of government. We have provincial governments, which have additional debt, and then municipalities, which in some cases do issue their own debentures that have to be paid by payers of property tax.
On top of that, we have corporate debt and personal debt. These other levels of debt are important because the same taxpayers who will be expected to shoulder the higher servicing costs that you anticipate in the federal budget framework are carrying their own personal debt. The $2-trillion economy we have is not just supporting the $651-billion federal debt. It's also supporting the provincial debt and the household debt.
Gluskin Sheff's chief economist, Dr. Rosenberg, did a calculation a month ago now showing that the combined Canadian debt—personal, corporate, and government—as a share of GDP is higher than debt levels in 15 or 20 other countries, including Greece, Italy, and Spain.
Do you not believe that the government should look at the overall debt burden of the Canadian population when determining how much the federal government can afford to borrow?