Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, as part of the audit we actually have looked at what other OECD member countries have done in this area of long-term fiscal sustainability. There is a fairly extensive table on pages 19 and 20, which shows the various jurisdictions and what they do in this area. In the

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I think that's a fine distinction that the Department of Finance officials, in conjunction and in consultation with the minster, have to make themselves. I don't think we're in a position to tell them what information they should be privy to and what should be made pub

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, first and foremost, we feel that the minister needs to have this as one piece of many pieces of information for him to recommend to his colleagues and finally have the government support the budget, so that, in the first instance, is the essence of our recommendation.

Public Accounts committee  From our perspective, information would help parliamentarians fulfill their responsibility to study the estimates.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, the question is not to get to a point of precision but for the perspective of completeness. Currently, Finance has agreed to provide the information at the federal government level, but it doesn't include the provinces or the territories, so the overall fiscal outlook

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, essentially we're looking for a complete picture. So by having the federal situation, and if we just go on what we just outlined, the federal government seems to be on a sustainable path. Some of the provinces seem to be struggling with the fiscal situation moving forw

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we actually have selected six measures. In some of those measures, a good example would be the GST reduction from 7% to 6% and then to 5%. On that particular measure, Finance exercised its judgment and decided that it was not going to be a significant impact in terms o

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we did accept that explanation and did not question Department of Finance further on that. In a lot of the other measures, we tried to do our own projection, but it would be difficult to do one on pension income splitting. In the report I think we explained that Fina

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I would make reference to paragraph 7.21, where we talk about the fact that the Department of Finance uses a number of assumptions and about the work that we do around that. Essentially, we first look at the process in terms of how Finance itself would know that the a

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I believe we did have access to the 2007 report. I don't know if we did review other reports that were published more regularly. We wanted to know whether those reports were being prepared and how often they were prepared. Based on the evidence that we saw, we were abl

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we did not specifically look at the impact of spending measures in our audit. Having said that though, when we look at the overall analysis for budget 2012, we identify that spending measures would be an important factor as well in terms of making sure the government i

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we have not done a specific analysis on spending restraint as a measure. We looked at six specific measures and we looked at the overall impact. We would not be able to identify the exact extent to which the spending restraint contributes to the overall improved pictur

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry, Mr. Chair, it's the Canada health transfer program.

Public Accounts committee  In the report we highlighted primarily three factors: the CHT, the Canada health transfer program; the old age security, increasing the age of eligibility; and the spending restraint. But the lion's share is borne by the CHT program.