Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We welcome for the first time our new Parliamentary Budget Officer to this committee.
I will repeat Mr. McCallum's comment that we completely support the role you're playing, recognizing, of course, that this role has been missing for a long time. This government committed to putting this office in place. I think it will prove to be of benefit to all parties in this House to provide more information. The reason we're here is to represent our constituents, and if we as members of Parliament don't have all the numbers at our disposal, then we're not doing the job that we could. So we do appreciate your comments and the role you're playing.
We recognize, certainly, what an unprecedented situation we're in. My first question would be in reference to where you get your numbers from. In looking through your biography, I recognize it's an incredible biography, the history that you have working in a number of government departments, so you have an incredible understanding of the workings of government.
At the Department of Finance we depend on a number of private sector forecasters to give us numbers and projections. The issues around the fall economic statement, of course, were dependent on those private sector forecasters, and we took sort of the middle of the road and factored in the stimulus that we presented in there. We have a number of private sector forecasts, and I'm just wondering if those are the basis of a number of your projections or all of your projections and how solid those are. We have to wonder, because those numbers were falling by the day last fall. They came out after the economic statement and asked where we got those numbers. Well, as a matter of fact, they're on your website. All of the private forecasters--I'm not saying you, I'm saying the private sector forecasters--gave us those numbers, and we took the difference between the high and the low and averaged it with the stimulus involved.
Can you share with us where you get some of these numbers?