There are two approaches. You can pay down the absolute level of the debt, and you do that by running surpluses. You would collect more in taxes than you're providing in services. You can certainly do that. The problem is that you would take a hit to GDP in the process.
The other approach is that you can work on the GDP part of the debt-to-GDP ratio, have a deficit, but drive it into better growth, such that you're using high multiplier activities—infrastructure, social programs, those sorts of things—and you continue to stay ahead of it.
In contrast to a household, which has a lifespan, such that at the end of everyone's hopefully long life here their debt is resolved in some way, the federal government and Canada, hopefully, do not have a lifespan; they continue indefinitely.
One other thing to understand is that it has really been the household sector that has taken on the debt over the last decade. The household sector and the federal government used to have the same debt-to-GDP ratio in the 1990s, both at about 40%. The federal government's has decreased to about 30% now; the household sector's is at 96% of GDP. The household sector has been spending about $70 billion in deficit every year and they have been doing this for a decade.
I think one of the challenges is how to reset that balance so that all the debt that's being incurred on Canadian balance sheets isn't exclusively happening at the household level, which is more or less what has happened since the crisis in 2009.