Environment committee  Thank you for inviting us here today. I am from Statistics Canada, as is my colleague Robert Smith. We would like to make a brief presentation about our environmental statistics program. Then we'll be happy to answer any questions. If that's all right, I will turn it over to my c

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for inviting us here today. I would like to take a few minutes to give a brief statement about Statistics Canada's role as the national statistics agency and about a few products and databases that may be of interest to this committee. Our m

Government Operations committee  That question is very difficult to answer from a statistical point of view. We're in the business of providing historical facts on what has transpired in the past. We do not do any forecasts, and unfortunately, the input-output models are not temporal models that can tell you any

Government Operations committee  What input-output models can give you is a base estimate of the relative magnitudes of stimulus, and that changes over time, so we would have to go back and do a type of simulation based on queries about specific industries to answer that question.

Government Operations committee  We can give relative impact statements, but economists generally take our database and they build econometric models that build behavioural aspects of the economy into their models and then do that type of analysis.

Government Operations committee  I don't have one right now in front of me, but we could respond to those questions.

Government Operations committee  We don't have the outsourcing specifically, but we do factor imports into the model.

Government Operations committee  That's correct.

Government Operations committee  No. We have no capacity to do that in input-output modelling, no.

Government Operations committee  I'll defer that question to Michel Girard, who is more of an expert on input-output modelling.

Government Operations committee  The model is annual only, not quarterly.

Government Operations committee  Basically, we're the economic historians. We can tell you facts about the state of the infrastructure, but it's up to analysts like you to decide where it's appropriate to make decisions.

Government Operations committee  That's a very detailed question, and I would leave you the paper to read on that.

Government Operations committee  I don't have those facts in front of me right now.

Government Operations committee  We do have statistics on municipal debt. It's not provided at the individual municipal level, but by province.