Welcome to our witnesses.
It's an interesting discussion. As you know, the Parliamentary Budget Officer's role is a complex and difficult one that is made more difficult, I suspect, because of requests that come to you from MPs and from political parties and for various other reasons. Those reasons can be political reasons. They can be anything, but they have an economic base.
I think it deserves to be mentioned that CRA is responsible under the Income Tax Act and under the Excise Tax Act. CRA members and officials are held criminally responsible for breaking confidentiality. That's not something to be taken lightly. It's certainly not something that is easy to deal with when you're dealing with personal information.
The other thing is the civic question on the tax gap that most G-20 countries don't follow up on, because you can't get good information on it, mainly because of confidentiality and the difficulty of handling it. I'm not asking for an answer on it, but I'm simply looking at your role and the difficulty of that role when you're trying to respond to questions with a limited budget. Even though you have a well-qualified team and a limited team, it's not an easy role.
I want to pick up on a comment that Mr. Askari made on the exports since 2000, because according to your information, really the exports since 2000 have not made a contribution to the Canadian economy. I'd like to explore that a little bit deeper. I don't think that's exactly what you meant, because I suspect if we took away the exports.... I mean, we are an export-driven economy and very much of that is commodity driven. If we took those exports out of the Canadian economy, I think we'd leave quite a gap there. Using rough numbers, 60% or 65% of our economy is export based. Of that, 72% or 73% is based on trading with the United States. I can't fathom that since 2000 it has really not made a contribution to the economy.
I'm going to give you a chance to explore that a little deeper.