Look at the Australian model. The PBO does a great deal of confidential work for political parties during the year. By the time you get to a writ period, they actually have a kind of costing book that has been done confidentially for MPs. That's a particular way to do this work. It's one modality.
It also runs in conflict, however, with what the OECD guidelines are for independent fiscal institutions, to which Canada is a signatory. These say that work should not be confidential, that it should be released simultaneously to all parties. As Mr. Page has said, the modalities matter, and this committee probably has a stake in how that new obligation of the PBO is actually discharged.
I'll also add that there's always an element of risk. Some of the major costing reports we did for parliamentarians, such as that on the F-35 fighter jet, take months to undertake, and that's if you get the data. In that case we didn't have it, so it took a little longer but we still did it. The issue is that it may not always dovetail with electoral processes.