The core purpose of the Conference Board is to be essentially the country's economic forecaster offering an alternative view. We have built tools that are very similar to what Quebec finance has, what Ontario finance has, and what the federal government—both the Bank of Canada and the Department of Finance—has, to provide a view to everybody on a fee-for-service basis. So we basically do a baseline forecast that's then available for everybody to subscribe to—governments, the private sector, universities, labour unions.
We can build scenarios quite happily into our forecast if we're engaged to do that, but we have to make an assumption to provide that baseline forecast. You'll often use the status quo assumption, although with a little bit of forward thinking, for example, in the case of Ontario. We know that Ontario is facing a very deep fiscal deficit. In fact, if there's a structural deficit in the country, it's in Ontario. We would factor that into our thinking in terms of their ability to pay ongoing increases to public sector employees in Ontario. In the federal government we have taken, basically, the status quo model, on a going forward basis, and then we'll make adjustments to the forecast, which we do every quarter, frankly. So as the facts change, we run the model again and come up with a different view.
We do many, many studies. We probably do 70 pieces of paid research a year, examining questions like the job impact of the federal stimulus package or the impact to different forms of public sector compensation on the economy.
So I could certainly do that work if there's an appetite to do it.