Public Accounts committee  I'll just say that the C.D. Howe Institute does a report card for all federal and provincial governments, and they grade us in terms of transparency and just general results—results in terms of bias and accuracy—and the federal government is at number two. We got an A-minus in th

Public Accounts committee  I don't have the the debt management strategy in front of me, but if you're reading it from the debt management strategy, yes, it is accurate.

Public Accounts committee  It's immediate, and there are two reasons for this. One is that, as the comptroller general was saying, we borrow across the yield curve. We have our debt management strategy, which tries to manage its cost and risk dynamics. One is cost. Shorter-term borrowing is less costly,

Public Accounts committee  I don't have the ratio at the tip of my fingers, but I think the direction in which the member is going is correct. The size in that balance sheet is being driven by the size of the long book, in terms of CMHC's underwriting of mortgages with high loan-to-value ratios.

Public Accounts committee  No, but I will reference page 1.9 in volume 1, which shows you the interest ratio on public debt charges since 1990. It shows the downward trajectory that the comptroller general was speaking to.

Public Accounts committee  To answer your first question, the financial statement discussion analysis should give you a picture at the highest level of what some of the one-off gains are. We referenced these one-off gains to other revenues in the context of crown corporations here. For more detail, you'd

Public Accounts committee  The debt-to-GDP ratio is effectively a crude metric, with debt on top, as we calibrate it. It's just the total accumulated deficit of the federal government over the size our economy. It really just gives an indication to two primary audiences: one is investors, the folks who hol

Public Accounts committee  That comparison is on page— Excuse me, Mr. Chair. I just want to make sure everyone has the right page in front of them.

Public Accounts committee  To get to a level of international comparability there have to be some kind of inputs and outputs so that we're all talking about the same type of debt. For basic understanding, we have a highly decentralized federation, in the sense that there are many spending obligations that

Public Accounts committee  I would add only a couple of other points. One is the foreign exchange gains. A lot of crown corporations hold financial assets in U.S. dollars, which translate to a Canadian dollar equivalent for the purposes of public accounts.

Public Accounts committee  It is our foreign exchange account in general, our foreign exchange holdings held at the Bank of Canada, which is in the order of magnitude of around $60 billion. Some part of that...I don't want to put a number on the table, but about half of it is held is U.S.-dollar assets.

Finance committee  The “Fiscal Monitor” is a monthly statement of operations. It effectively shows our income statement on a monthly basis. The real purpose for us is two things. It shows the budgetary surplus or deficit in any one month, and it also sets our ultimate cash requirements. It's the in

Finance committee  Not an account per se, but yes—

Finance committee  Yes, there's a cumulative surplus of $3.2 billion year to date December.

Finance committee  In 2015 in general we had two quarters of negative growth at the beginning of the year, driven almost entirely by a decline in investment in the energy sector. We bounced back in the third quarter and now we're anticipating our fourth quarter results at the beginning of March. Bu