Right.
Sorry, Minister, I do have an agenda here and I'm going to make sure I get through it. It's a lot better than in question period, when we only have 30 seconds.
I would say to your response, Minister, that any CEO knows the importance of quarterly updates. Otherwise, why do we wait until the end of the year to tell everybody what happened? You know that yourself as well.
This is question number two, Minister.
In both the mandate letter and your own words, you talk about platform promises. First of all, your mandate letter states, “Our platform guides our government. Over the course of our...mandate, I expect us to deliver on all of our commitments. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that we fulfill our promises, while living within our fiscal plan.”
Second, you said on the television show The Exchange, on November 4, “We're committed to our platform, and that's why we put it out there. It wasn't a platform that was based on political expediency. It's a platform based on what we think is the right thing to do for Canada and for Canadians.”
Minister, this is my issue: You seem to abandon the costs associated with your platform promises very easily. I would point out to you that my understanding is that as the chief economic adviser for the platform, you did the costing, or you at least signed off on it. You promised a $2.8-billion offset in your tax measures would be offset by a tax increase of $2.8 billion. We now know the reality: it's a $1.3-billion cost.
Second, you said that you would have a deficit of $10 billion. You approved this number. I've already mentioned that. Those were numbers that came after Minister Oliver's projections in April. So you had lots of runway to figure out if something else was going on in the economy.
You're committed to the platform promises, but I fear that you're not committed to the numbers. Here's the problem with that. I take a look at your platform promises and I see lots of other stuff coming—a 10% boost to GIS, indexing OAS, GST rebates, increased indexed northern residents deduction, enhanced flexibility of RRSPs.
Do you have those numbers right, Minister? Because so far we have not seen any kind of consistency in terms of getting the predictions correct.