Having said that, I am glad that this capacity is in place now, and there are lots of budgets and estimates processes to look forward to, in which we could, hopefully, support your efforts.
As to the second part of your question, to what extent will we be relying on Finance Canada's analytics, and are we adequately resourced and well positioned within the Library of Parliament to provide this advice, it's obviously early going, sir, but I am comfortable that we will be in a position to provide the challenge function that you'll want us to provide.
While we'll certainly be reviewing Finance's analytics very carefully, we won't actually be relying on them to provide that challenge function. As you know, depending on the nature of the economic and fiscal analysis forecasting issues, there are a lot of private sector companies we can work with to look at the range of forecasts that are out there—low and high—and that also provide a lot of analysis of the measures Finance puts forward in the budget.
So we could leverage a lot of resources from just the community out there right now in order to provide this advice. Some of those leveraged resources are in the Library of Parliament as well, which, as Madam Chair has pointed out, has actually served committees well.
We also plan on staffing. We have a fairly substantial budget; it's not necessarily substantial in comparison with the Congressional Budget Office, which is a very different system, but it's certainly substantial for a Westminster system. Within that ongoing budget of roughly $2.7 million a year, if we hire very strong analysts, we think we could go a long way in supporting a good challenge function.
We've already made two very careful hires, sir, in terms of the director positions, one on the economic and fiscal analysis side, Mr. Mostafa Askari. Mostafa has a PhD from Queen's University. He's taught at Queen's and Trent universities. He's worked at the Conference Board, a private sector institution, looking at private sector forecasts. He helped build Finance Canada's models in the 1980s. He's worked at the International Monetary Fund. Recently he was a research director at Health Canada, dealing with a wide range of issues. So he has a broad knowledge.
We have also hired Sahir Khan to help us on revenue and expenditure analysis issues. Mr. Khan has an accounting and economics background from Queen's and Columbia universities. He spent almost 10 years working in New York City in the turnaround environment there, so he's quite familiar with dealing with challenging issues. These are issues that this committee has looked at, issues of procurement and real property, etc. He's quite capable on the financial analysis side.
So if we staff underneath these people with some other capable people, we could provide a lot of horsepower. I think it would be helpful. That is our objective, sir.