Let me start with the sovereign wealth fund, the Canada Strong fund. I think the announcement in the spring economic statement raised more questions than it answered. In terms of long-term growth, let me speak to some of the questions that come to mind from what was presented in that statement.
The statement set out the government's objectives as essentially twofold. One is to grow the economy, build infrastructure and tackle productivity, which is really quite a broad range of actions to make the economy better. The other is to essentially allow Canadians to invest in that fund so they would be protected from downside risk and would be able to benefit from upside risk that would be tagged as a great rate of return.
Canadians already have a stake in the spending of public money through the debt, debt charges and taxes that they pay. I think there's an important set of governance and transparency questions about how those debt charges will be calculated in that rate of return and what transparency and protections against misappropriation and misuse will happen in terms of how investors can benefit from those public funds but be protected from downside risks and loan losses, and who will track those loan losses and who will benefit from those loans.
Separately, I think there are a range of questions raised in terms of spending less to invest more.
If the government is not happy with how the mixture of EDC, BDC, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, regional development agencies, grants and contributions on business, and tax breaks for business is not delivering results, it would be helpful if the government could be clearer on what gap it's trying to solve with this new agency that will have overhead and the transparency questions that I tagged earlier.
If that's the path forward and the protections are in place, where will the government spend less in terms of that large suite of expenditures that are already targeted at meeting those objectives?