Addressing the growing debt problem should be a pressing issue for governments at both the federal and provincial levels once the pandemic begins to subside, says a new report. Authored by Fraser Institute senior economist Jake Fuss and senior policy analyst Steve Lafleur, the report points out that the debt has increased significantly since the 2008–09 recession and rose even more over the past year due to the necessary spending to address the impact of the pandemic. “In just over a decade, combined federal and provincial debt has grown by $981.2 billion, or 95.4 percent,” the report says The spending in response to COVID-19, the report notes, is only a continuation of a trend toward deficit spending that took hold in 2009, breaking away from the norm of balanced budgets and lower debt burdens that prevailed from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s. In the years since, net debt at …