Thank you.
I took a look at the government's balance sheet today for the year 2018-19. It showed that the Government of Canada had a negative net worth of $685 billion. That was before the coronavirus.
Parliamentary Budget Officer, according to the updates you've provided, it's now $968 billion, by the end of the year. We call it the federal debt, but it is actually assets minus liabilities, which typically we would call the net worth. How is it possible for any entity to have a negative net worth of a trillion dollars, $968 billion? The answer is that the major asset of the federal government is not on its balance sheet. It is taxation power. Therefore, when we ask whether the government can afford to pay its bills, the major question we need to consider is whether the population can afford to pay the government.
That's why I find, frankly, your and other officials' reference to our debt-to-GDP ratio as being so deceptive. Our debt-to-GDP ratio for this year is not 48%. It is somewhere closer to 360%, because the federal government does not have a claim on the entire economy. That economy has to support the debt of federal, provincial and municipal governments, plus corporations, plus households. When you add all of that together, we were at 356% of GDP back in 2018, before the coronavirus struck.
You said that we have all this room to spend before we reach the 1995 levels of near bankruptcy, but what was the total economy-wide debt-to-GDP in 1995, as compared to today?