Public Accounts committee  That's a very good question, sir. When we started this project in 2010, we went to different people to look at what our choices were with models. We were also looking at the history of this particular fighter plane from the early 1990s to present day. We looked at more bottom-up, more detailed parameter models where you literally cost component by component—the engine, the airframe, stealth components, etc.

Public Accounts committee  I think that's well said. I would add to that, sir, that these types of models.... Everybody is using these models. It wasn't hard to find them in the U.K. and the United States. They're well used. In the SAR reports that we're using now, we provide an estimate actually of O&S.; It's based on a CER parametric kind of model.

Public Accounts committee  Actually, Mr. Sahir Khan will take that question. Thank you, sir.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, sir, for the question. The model that we used in the report, which is actually described in some detail—certainly the model and the assumptions—is what we would call a cost-estimating relationship model. We're historically extrapolating costs on fighter planes. We used this extrapolation of 30 years of history of previous fighter planes, indexed, based on a per-kilogram kind of basis, to project forward an estimate of acquisition costs.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. By way of introduction, I have Peter Weltman, one of the principal authors of our F-35 work. Tolga Yalkin, senior analyst, is another principal author of our F-35 work. Mr. Sahir Khan is the assistant parliamentary budget officer for expenditure and revenue analysis.

Finance committee  Sir, on the commodity prices, effectively we were using the Bank of Canada commodity price index. If you look at the data, the latest releases of the Bank of Canada commodity price index for March 2012, you will see year-over-year declines of the overall index, probably of about 12%.

Finance committee  You'll also see declines in agriculture, energy, forestry, etc.

Finance committee  I think it just a language issue. I think both what you're saying and—

Finance committee  Sir, just to be short, we also do this for a living. We look at the average private sector forecast. We benchmark all the time against the average private sector forecast, including in our reports. When we made the decision to move away from average private sector forecasts, we were looking at estimates for U.S. economic growth that were in the 3% range at that particular time.

Finance committee  The analysis we provide very much follows the same methodology provided by the Department of Finance in the 2009 budget, the 2010 budget, and the 2012 budget—it's an aggregate number. We have not broken out estimates for what the impact would be in Ottawa. We've undertaken an exercise working with departments, department by department, program by program.

Finance committee  More generally, I think it speaks to a question and our response provided, I think to Mr. Hoback, that there could be some.... We're taking some tough actions now, reducing our debt-to-GDP ratio, and there will be initial drag in the short term. I think Chris was quoting some private sector economists on this.

Finance committee  If we freeze the direct program spending in nominal terms, it's somewhere in the neighbourhood of $115 billion, so we're saying almost flat or negative growth over the next five years. That direct program spending, as you say, will fall very dramatically. The question for us, and what we would like to provide to parliamentarians, is what will the impact be?

Finance committee  We have no comment. We have no analysis. Again, we are trying to do the distribution analysis, department by department, but I think the government is quite focused on trying to do this operationally. Mr. Jean talked about that. We were going to look at that. What are the plans in place to achieve these efficiencies?

Finance committee  When we provide these estimates, we want to be clear to Parliament where we think the economy is vis-à-vis potential. We're saying right now, as we look in this particular context today, that we're probably operating somewhere about two percentage points below potential. The IMF and the OECD present similar analyses from the reports.

Finance committee  I'll defer to Chris to provide the page numbers in the announcement, but I think as Chris said earlier, what we provide in our tables are figures that are provided on a net basis. When we're talking about jobs, we're talking about net jobs. When the government spends additional moneys--and there's roughly $1 billion of additional spending in the 2012 budget, and there was lots of spending in previous budgets--that creates jobs.