I'm glad you raised that matter. It goes back to how—if I learned anything in 36 years at Statistics Canada it is this—you cannot understand the world through statistics. They are a very limited way of understanding the world.
For example, you talked about gross versus net. I'm not going to bore people with that. I agree with your statement about CPP and QPP, but there's another unfunded liability out there: the civil service pensions. The C.D. Howe Institute has published a gazillion studies on how that is not accounted for at all or it is not properly accounted for in the government books. There's a large unfunded liability out there that the government has never acknowledged. That's an example of how you can look at gross debt, but even that's missing some important things in the real world out there.