Public Accounts committee  Doug Nevison, from the Department of Finance.

Public Accounts committee  Let me go back to the original question about assessment. While the Auditor General's office is correct that the final report on economic assessment is still to be drafted, I would point out that there have been a number of assessments done while the program has been in place. Th

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I may have misunderstood the question, but if you're talking about reports to Canadians, as mentioned by Mr. Campbell, the government has committed to doing a final report on the economic impact of Canada's economic action plan. Once we had all the relevant

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. Just to follow up on your question, as I mentioned, in terms of tabling to Parliament, both budget 2009 and budget 2010 had the methodology for the jobs estimate that I mentioned, using the macroeconomic model. That methodology has been presented to Parliament on two

Public Accounts committee  No date's been determined. As I said, we're still looking at the most recent information we received. Once we feel this information has been verified, then the decision will be taken on when the report will be released. In terms of a particular date, we do know that the spending

Public Accounts committee  I'd be happy to. As I mentioned, even though data was gathered at the project level, there was a feeling early on, based on previous experience and experience in other jurisdictions as well, that it's very difficult to get consistent job numbers across such a wide range of proje

Public Accounts committee  As I mentioned, the methodology was laid out in both budget 2009 and an annex in budget 2010. It's all there.

Public Accounts committee  The last report to Canadians, but the 2011 budget also had some updates. The last official report to Canadians was in January 2011.

Public Accounts committee  We got away from referring to them as quarterly reports. My understanding was that the obligation for a quarterly was within the first year of the program. I'm not an expert on what the parliamentary motion was in terms of the report, but my understanding was that the quarterly w

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. We agree that because of the diverse projects and proponents, it's very challenging to get consistent project-level data across that board. As I mentioned, even if you were able to get that completely consistent across 20,000-something projects, there still is a miss

Public Accounts committee  As I said, even if it was consistent, it wouldn't be an appropriate measure of the job impact. But as the Office of the Auditor General has noted, there were consistency problems across projects. I think that would be expected across such a wide range of project proponents. Tha

Public Accounts committee  In terms of the reports to Canadians, that's more of a macro look at the economic action plan, and we relied on departments in Ottawa to work with their partners on the specific projects under their jurisdictions. So from our perspective, that cooperation worked very well. No con

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. Maybe I'll take that last point first. The 610,000 is the actual number of jobs that have been created since the trough of the recession in July 2009.

Public Accounts committee  But the 220,000, as I said, is basically an assessment of what the economic action plan, the spending and the tax reductions, based on our model would produce in terms of jobs created or jobs maintained. That methodology has been consistent through the entire process, from budget

Public Accounts committee  When I mentioned the U.S. experience with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it wasn't necessarily from a design perspective in terms of how our particular programs were designed vis-à-vis similar programs in the United States. It was more in terms of the macroeconomic a