Yes, I don't know. I work for the parliamentary budget office, not the parliamentary spending restraint office.
There's one thing I will say. For the first 10 years of my career I worked in the federal public service in Finance, the Privy Council Office, the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Bank of Canada. I spent a lot of time working on restraint exercises. The timelines are tight. You can certainly find money.
The timelines are very, very tight that the government has in mind, and given the order of magnitude of the funding that they're looking at.... It doesn't mean it can't be done. It just means that, to the best of my knowledge, it is a significant undertaking, and potentially.... I think the public service is certainly up to the challenge, but if you go back to the 2012 restraint exercise, in that situation we had the 2011 election, Parliament came back in June, direction was provided to the public service at the end of June, and then we had a budget in March of the subsequent year, 2012.
In that situation, you were looking at around a 5% spending cut as opposed to.... Now, as I understand it, it's 7.5%, going up to 15%. In that situation, for the 5% spending cut, you were looking at nine to 10 months.
You can do it, but it will be tight for them.