Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the witnesses for coming.
Mr. Page, I have a quick question. I've been on this committee for the last six or seven years. I used to chair it. We used to have independent forecasters come forward, and we always had a problem in terms of getting estimates. If I can ask you a question in terms of simplifying it, or explaining your job exactly, what do you do that's different from the economic forecasters? Everybody seems to take the forecasting growth, they take a percentage of what we think that's going to be, they take a percentage of the government revenues, and we decide that government revenues are going to go up by that percentage, and that's it, the work is done, because we can't get any information on what's going to be spent. And even when we do have budgets, the budgets are not respected. But with the Liberal governments, at least, it wasn't respected and we actually underspent. With this government, they seem to be overspending, so we have the same type of problem going the opposite way.
My first question is, what is in your job, as the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer, that would be different from the economic forecasters to your right?