If it needs to be a matter of record to the committee, you can see the comparison between G7 countries on page 37. We outline the mechanics of going from the accumulated deficit basis, which is the debt metric you see in the public accounts and what the federal government reports on in its updates and budgets: how you get from there to this definition of “total government net debt”, which is what the IMF uses to compare on an internationally comparable basis.
I admit that there are a lot of gymnastics here, to be quite honest, because of the diversity in terms of how governments operate at the sovereign level and the sub-sovereign levels, how they fund their social security schemes and how they fund their internal public service pension and benefits schemes.
The IMF has to do a series of mechanical adjustments to level-set all these G7 countries. You can see those mechanics on page 38. The big elements here, though, are accounting for public sector pensions and benefits, so again, internal to government pensions and benefits, and also, as the member opposite spoke to, the inclusion of the CPP/QPP assets.
A fundamental issue there is that most other G7 countries don't fund their social security schemes, so they take the equivalent of what is the CPP premium and they bring it into their income statement, effectively managing these social security schemes on a pay-as-you-go basis. To establish this level of comparability, the IMF, in a kind of distorted way, takes that into consideration and brings the assets of the CPP/QPP into the accounts of Canada in order to compare these across G7 countries.
Understand that your target of criticism, because you have to ask yourself whether the assets of the CPP/QPP would be available to the government in a time of distress, and I think clearly they.... Well, I'll leave it for some future government to decide—