FEATURED HEADLINE
The federal government is regularly telling the country its debt looks excellent compared to other major nations, but that claim only works because it subtracts nearly a trillion dollars of your pension savings from the total. The Canada Pension Plan and Quebec Pension Plan hold roughly a trillion dollars built from the contributions of workers and employers, money that is legally locked in to pay future retirement benefits. When officials calculate Canada’s net debt, they subtract those massive pension assets from what governments actually owe, which makes the remaining debt figure shrink dramatically and lets Canada rank near the bottom among G7 countries. That smaller number is then used to argue there is room to borrow hundreds of billions more.
The problem is simple and most people do not realize it: the government cannot touch those pension funds to pay its own debts or cover new spending. The money belongs to the contributors and is protected for their pensions. So the low-debt story Canadians keep hearing depends on counting savings that are unavailable for the debt itself, while the actual amount governments have borrowed keeps growing and will still have to be managed by taxpayers.
Without subtracting the pension money, Canada’s debt would look a lot bigger and more ordinary.
Right now the official story uses the net debt number that includes those roughly one trillion dollars in CPP and QPP assets as if they reduce the debt. That makes Canada look like it has the lowest debt among major countries (around 12–13% of the economy).
If you leave those pension assets out because the government cannot actually use them to pay its bills, the remaining debt is much higher. On the broader measures that just count what governments actually owe, Canada’s total debt sits well over 100% of the size of the economy. That puts it roughly in the middle or toward the higher end of other big countries, not at the bottom.
In plain terms, the low-debt ranking disappears and Canada looks like a country that has borrowed a large amount of money, the same way most other developed countries have.
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