For members who may not be familiar with the terminology, statutory spending is the spending that is directly through legislation, where we don't actually put a hard cap on the spending.
A good example is the EI program. If you qualify for EI, you get a cheque—I guess you get a direct deposit now, not a cheque. That's in legislation. We do our best to forecast those numbers. The same goes for the old age security payments. For departments, basically, we spend what we spend, and that's the way the program works. Voted expenditures means departments have to respect the limits there.
The increases in statutory spending, and it's an increasing trend in terms of statutory spending going up, is largely around the legislated increase to the Canada health transfer, which is a significant increase, as well as the demographics for our aging population. We're having higher increases in old age security programs driving those numbers. Those are the two things I would highlight for you there.
In terms of specific adjustments to this year's statutory forecast that we're making in supplementary estimates (B), Finance has shared with us that their initial estimate for interest expense for the year is now lower because long-term interest rates have stayed low, as well as the softwood lumber payments that they're now forecasting at zero, largely because of the U.S. housing market.
For voted, I think I would refer members of the committee to slides 6 and 7 to get a sense of the major items, and I think we've been through them all. The one I would highlight for you is the Treasury Board Secretariat compensation adjustments, just because it's a central vote that's going out to departments, and we've already touched on it. We hadn't seen that for a couple of years because of the operating budget freeze, or at least not to this extent.