Anyone who remembers what happened in the 1990s will remember that one of the biggest targets for federal spending cuts when the federal government got into fiscal trouble back then were transfers to other levels of government. A number of provinces found that their budgetary plans were thrown badly out of line by the withdrawal of the federal government support they had built in.
That is a vulnerability that we should remember as we watch the federal government's debt servicing costs grow, because it's, I think, inevitable that, if the federal government starts to feel fiscal pressure along the lines of what we had in the 1990s, it will be transfers to the provinces that will be one of the major areas that they will have to cut. It's not because it's necessarily the first place they want to go but because those transfers are very big and, when you're under a lot of fiscal pressure, you're going to have to cut the big things.