Sure. I'll address your earlier points about the websites and the information request and then I'll talk about the economic question.
First, I think the government should be applauded for the kind of transparency that we saw in the first trimester report, and particularly on the aspect of the report that went through and showed how the authorities are being updated so the money could flow. I don't think the government was really in a position to go beyond that because authorities were just being put in place, but there's some complimentary language in our reports today about that level of transparency and that level of detail.
For us, from the point of view of setting the standard, if we can maintain that standard as we move forward and we're showing the money flowing on a program-by-program level basis at that level of detail--the point Mr. McCallum raised--I think that would actually go a long way to satisfying everybody. Probably it would really be a best practice internationally in the world today. So what we've highlighted today are some potential information gaps. I think they're normal. They're information gaps not in the sense that we expect them to be in a first report but in terms of the second report. We didn't really see the indicators that you'll be using to assess either the flow of the money or the impact assessment of those programs once in place, what they're intended to achieve, but I'm sure that hopefully they will be in the next report. So we're just putting a marker down.
In terms of information requested of the Department of Finance, sir, thank you again for your support. We still have not received.... We have made repeated requests. When we provide these economic provisions and do our analysis, we make them available to you. And most of us here and certainly on this side of the table all spent many years at the Department of Finance. In fact, with me I have two of the senior directors of forecasting at the Department of Finance, Mostafa Askari and Chris Matier. But we still have not got back the information we requested. We're familiar with what is cabinet confidence and what is not cabinet confidence. The information we want has actually been published in the past and was actually made available to private sector forecasters so they can do their work. We just want that same ability to have that same information. I made that point to Mr. Rob Wright yesterday, the Deputy Minister of Finance.
Sir, I want to respond to the economic point that you raised, why did we look at GDI and GDP, and are we moving away from it today in today's report. But first, I think more importantly, there's the issue of why look at different measures. I think what we tried to do in the March 11 report is provide a broader perspective on what was happening in the fourth quarter from different perspectives. So we provided the numbers on GDP. We showed the 3.5% decline roughly on a quarter-to-quarter basis. We showed the decline in nominal GDP, which is an over-double-digit decline on a quarter-to-quarter basis in the fourth quarter. We showed the decline in gross domestic income, which really is a measure of income that takes an account of commodity price changes really through the terms of trade, which is a measure StatsCan releases, and it's released by the statistical agencies in the United States. So we gave you three indicators and we provided them all. We wanted to give a more comprehensive view. We compared that both when you look at the quarter and when you annualize and when you look at the trends over the past year. So it's very backward-looking. There is no forecast involved in that kind of perspective.
Early in 2008, when the Canadian economy's output numbers were sagging a little bit, a lot of economists were looking at gross domestic income because they were saying that because of the high dollar and commodity prices staying high.... We were flagging that, saying this is a positive thing: it was supporting tax bases; it was supporting purchasing power. But what happened, and I think most Canadians have witnessed it, was the plunge in commodity prices, the plunge in oil prices and other commodities as well. That is reflected very much and is really picked up in that gross domestic income figure. But we wanted people to see what that looks like both from a quarter-to-quarter perspective and when you looked over the past year from a year-over-year perspective. So we made those numbers available to provide a broader perspective.
So in regard to purchasing power, because Canadians benefit so much by commodity prices, we wanted to give that broader perspective. We provide in our information, our presentation today, both--