The federal governments net debt — all of its assets minus all its liabilities — dropped for the 10th year in a row, Statistics Canada reported this morning.
At March 31, 2007, net financial debt stood at $508.1–billion, a drop of $6–billion or 1.2 per cent compared to our net debt at March 31, 2006.
Between 1997 and 2007, net debt has now dropped $80–billion. Now the partisans among you might notice that Liberal governments lowered net debt by $74–billion in their last nine years in power – about $8–billion a year — and all the Tories could do in their first year was to lower it by a paltry $6–billion — and the Tories had the benefit of a skyrocketing dollar, record resource revenue, generational low unemployment rates, generational low interest rates, etc. etc. In fact, Statscan says the most significant change in the country’s financial position was the $5.1–billion increase in the country’s foreign currency reserves. Liabilities decreased by less than $1–billion.
But partisan nit-picking like that would be unseemly …
Measured as a percentage of our gross national product, net debt is now 34.8 per cent compared to 36.8 per cent at March 31, 2006.
Net debt, you’ll recall, is now an important public policy term because Finance Minister Jim Flaherty declared that it ought to be the goal of his and every government in Canada to wrestle the combined net debt of the federal and provincial governments to zero by 2021.