Finance committee  Yes, they're considered a contingent liability. I think as Mr. Moreau indicated, on the balance sheet of a government, there are different types of liabilities, not just market borrowings or borrowings from the financial institutions. For a borrowing authority, we scope it to ba

Finance committee  No. I'll give you some examples of other types of liabilities, like pension liabilities. There are other payables that the government may be liable for at the end of a fiscal year. These are factored into the total liabilities. To give you a comparison or example, this balance

Finance committee  It's $1.088 trillion.

Finance committee  I would actually express it in two different ways. One concept is the balance sheet concept, and this is where the question of other liabilities comes in, like contingent liabilities. That measure is sort of an accounting concept. The concept we tried to capture here in the borr

Finance committee  Sorry, the $1.168 trillion borrowing authority?

Finance committee  Oh, I see. I would have to double-check with our accountants because some of them are carried on explicitly in the balance sheet. Others are in another category that are not reflected in the $1.088 trillion.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm the chief of the debt management section at the Department of Finance. Loan guarantees for accounting treatment are not usually carried directly on the balance sheet. They are a contingent liability. When we looked at the issue of the borrowing limit,

Finance committee  Yes. Certainly the intention was to permit the government to consider the use of a court, but it's not specified here in the legislation what exactly the court would do. One possibility would be that the court would facilitate negotiations between all the relevant parties.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  I think that's a fair statement. In effect the proposed amendments would set the definitions for these terms more or less in legislation as opposed to leaving it for regulations. Indeed it also purports to, I believe, change other definitions in regard to when there is quorum for

Finance committee  Thank you very much for the question. I would perhaps just refer back to your reference to the consultations that occurred in June 2011. I think it was clear, as it was articulated already, that there is actually seemingly little consensus on various aspects of frameworks such a

Finance committee  It's not clear to me there is consensus.

Finance committee  I would defer to them to speak to whom they represent and whom they don't represent.

Finance committee  I would just refer back again to what is already in the public domain—the consultations from the June 2011 process. I think our summary there is very clear that there's no consensus.

Finance committee  Let me try to answer this way. The proposed framework that the department would have in mind would set out all the relevant factors in the regulations.