International Trade committee  Yes. Well, we like to keep a certain level of stability in the system. What's trendy today or maybe not necessary today may well be the most crucial piece of information you need next year. That's always the tough decision. A certain industry may be totally healthy this year, but it may have problems next year, and it may be crucial that we know about those things.

International Trade committee  No, that's not foreign direct investment, but it's an important flow. It's probably one we don't measure as well as we could. I think this was recognized at the G-7 summit three years ago, that there are measurement difficulties for all the big countries now that immigration is a much more important factor and families are sending money back to their families.

International Trade committee  I'll give you a general answer. First of all, we consult fairly widely--as widely as we can--with users, whether they're in business or they are our colleagues in the policy departments. We have a series of advisory committees. We try to go out to speak to businessmen and businesswomen and organizations as much as we can.

International Trade committee  There are a variety. A couple of them, I think, may be more from my policy colleagues to comment on.

International Trade committee  I'll start with the insurance. It certainly has been one of the stronger ones. We've had some strong Canadian investment overseas in recent years, so it's one of the stronger-moving series. I think we have some fairly strong companies in that area of foreign direct investment in both directions.

International Trade committee  I don't think there's any particular treatment for non-profits that I'm aware of. There is a special program where we provide additional information to universities and through the school systems for research that's available for free, but I'm not aware of a program particularly aimed at other non-profit institutions.

International Trade committee  We measure and publish everything in Canadian dollars. Often the transactions are in some other currency, or particularly for foreign direct investment, our assets abroad are often measured in other currencies. So we translate those into Canadian dollars using current exchange rates.

International Trade committee  There's some limited data on other countries on the Stats Canada website. But with the Internet now, you can access data on many other websites around the world. IMF and the OECD have data available on various websites on a wide range of countries or member countries. So this can be accessed fairly readily through the Internet, with tabulations and so on.

International Trade committee  Yes. The more detail we get, the longer the lags are, particularly for services and somewhat for foreign direct investment as well. The detailed estimates depend on the annual surveys we conduct. We mail those out after the reference year, and then it often takes up to 18 months to prepare the data, which is a fairly long lag.

International Trade committee  To the extent we could improve the data, I guess it would be advantageous to both businesses and policy-makers.

International Trade committee  No, we don't. It's a fairly resource-intensive activity, so we haven't done that. We have had some musings about possibly doing it with Europe, particularly now that the EU is sort of one unit. We could do it with the EU as a total, rather than with each separate country. We have had minor discussions at that level, but we haven't explored that very much at the moment.

International Trade committee  It's largely a resource problem. It is a fairly labour-intensive activity. As you've heard, not all countries use exactly the same methodologies. Once a year, we take our Canadian data and massage it as best we can to be equal in concept to the U.S. data, and then we compare the values.

International Trade committee  We have the preliminary data, released this morning, for all aspects of the balance of payments, which was handed out for up to the end of 2006. We do it on a quarterly basis, thus it's fairly aggregate data. Later on, for certain aspects, such as trade in services and foreign direct investment, we are able to produce more detail.

International Trade committee  In principle, there's no minimum amount. I suppose in a practical sense it's difficult to find the very small transactions. For instance, for imports arriving through the post or courier systems, very low values are estimated at sort of an aggregated group level from the postal system, the courier system, through the exports, and so on.

International Trade committee  On the research questions, I can't identify a particular paper. I think there have been some papers produced at Stats Canada on looking at the effects of trade on productivity and growth in different industries by our productivity people. We could try to find those and circulate them to members, if necessary.