Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good morning and welcome to our committee meeting today. I want to echo the chair's congratulations on your appointment as the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer. Of course, as you know, it was a Conservative government that created this office with a view to receiving that very impartial advice that you noted in your opening remarks. I look forward to working with you over the next six months. Hopefully the Prime Minister will see this appointment as being very important and look to putting someone in place on a permanent basis.
I want to get right to some of the questions that we have based on the reports that have been released to date. Would you agree that without a clear definition of what counts as operating spending, it's impossible to evaluate whether the government is on track to meet its fiscal anchors?