It is a good reflection of a country's ability to repay its debt, to service its debt in relation to the size of its economy, so full stop on that. I think there is consensus that it's a good metric in terms of overall debt sustainability over the near term, and over the longer term from a fiscal sustainability perspective.
I acknowledge that there are some pitfalls and caveats when you start comparing between countries—I think we've touched on that at this committee before—because every country is different. You have the highest sovereign level of governments and you have provinces at sub-sovereign levels. For the IMF to establish this level of comparability, they have to do a lot of different puts and takes.
We do this reconciliation on page 35 to be very clear and transparent in terms of how we go from a federal debt-to-GDP ratio, which is the kind of target the government talks to in terms of how it wants to achieve a certain target in its budgets or updates, versus Canada's net debt-to-GDP ratio, which is what is compared across countries. That reconciliation is shown on page 36.