As I said in my opening remarks, if we just look at page 328 of the budget, you can see clearly there that the forecasted debt-to-national-income ratio stops rising next year and is projected to decline very gradually from there.
As I said in my opening remarks, that meets what I call the minimum or a technical definition of sustainability, which is that debt is not continuing to rise—debt is actually slowing—relative to your ability to service it. Debt service, public debt charges, remain not much above 1% of the national income, which for reference is around one-fifth of what they were in the mid-1990s, for example, when we hit a bit of a fiscal wall.
That's a positive way to put it. If you believe that it leaves us unequipped to deal with the next big shock that comes to the economy, that's a judgment. I won't make that judgment today, but if you believe that, then you would probably argue for a faster decline in indebtedness over time. That's something for the political process to work out, but it's not necessary to meet what I call the minimum requirements of sustainability.