Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here, Minister.
I have a lot of questions for you, but little time, so I may cut you off.
I'd like to come back to the matter of investment.
The way Quebec does things has come up a lot. Quebec separates investments. Unless I'm mistaken, this is what we're talking about, and I put the question to former Quebec finance minister Mr. Leitão earlier. We are talking about capital investment, meaning investments in equipment and infrastructure to support production. My understanding is that the capital investment is not in the form of loans or tax credits, but we will own what it supports.
This is what I'd like to understand. How things are done in Quebec and how they're done in the federal government fall into two separate categories. I asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer about what we own, and he told me that it's about 4% of all the expenditures being charged by the government.
The investment numbers suggest that everything has been lumped under that category: tax credits, loans and so on. What does the government own? Was the 4% figure the Parliamentary Budget Officer gave us wrong? The government is calling it an investment, but no, it's spending.