The federal government has certain types of financial assets and investments in certain Crown corporations, such as the Bank of Canada, that are quite appropriate to the machinery of government, but I do not think the public sector has a very good track record of making financial investments. This is not the same as investing in hard infrastructure, such as ports, airports and so on, which governments can uniquely undertake. Perhaps it's time to unload some of those assets. Those are the types of investments that I think people usually have in mind when they think about things the public sector is uniquely able to do.
I do worry, as other people do, that when you have investment funds with unclear mandates—a mixture of financial return and nation building, regional development and that type of thing—you're going to end up making decisions that are not economically guided.
I worry about the expansion of the federal government's balance sheet. I would worry about that if it was occurring at the provincial level as well. I think it makes the public finances more risky and more opaque than they would otherwise be.