Thank you for the question.
My answer is very nuanced. I have never ever suggested that Canada is about to go bankrupt. I am saying this as someone who has travelled around the world to many, many countries: we are truly one of the wealthiest countries on the planet earth, per person. I'm not playing words with GDP; I'm talking per person. We have one of the highest standards of living in the world. Actually, basically, we're tied with Germany, by the way.
My issue with the deficit is in terms of not today and not tomorrow and not with the federal government. It's with the provincial governments. I think within a very near future you are going to be called upon to bail out some provinces. How about New Brunswick? No offence if anyone is from New Brunswick. How about Newfoundland and Labrador? We aren't even yet at the tsunami, and the PBO has very clearly shown that provinces are going to be vulnerable because the burden of aging is going to fall disproportionately on them and they have fewer revenue sources than the federal government.
To finish the nuance, we are reducing our degrees of freedom because money is finite. That is to say, no government has infinite resources, so money spent today on this, on x, is not money that's available tomorrow to spend on y or z.
What I'm saying is that we know there's a tsunami of aging coming. We know that. This isn't a theory. It's coming, so we should husband our resources—sorry for the gendered language—and not squander our resources on things that are not essential. It's about choices.
Andrew Coyne has made this argument brilliantly. It's about choices, and budgets are about making choices, as Aaron Wildavsky, the late, great dean at Berkeley, used to argue all the time. That's my fundamental criticism.
It's not that Canada is going to fail and it's not that Canada is going to go bankrupt. We're reducing our degrees of freedom for the future.