I can't speak for Mr. Vaughan, but certainly my impression of the PBO report was that it was written by accountants and financial analysts. When you have those folks—no offence to them—writing a report, they often use financial modelling, and in financial modelling you have to make a whole bunch of assumptions.
I think I agree with my colleague, Mr. Vaughan, that some of those assumptions may turn out to be false. I think we should take our direction from people with lived experience—the witnesses we heard from—because one thing that the PBO's report does not do is assess the level of effectiveness of any one of the interventions. They haven't broken it down in a way that I think is digestible and makes sense given the testimony we've heard, and I think we have to take their conclusions with a large degree of caution.
Furthermore, I think we should be asking them to clearly identify any of the assumptions they've made in their report so that we can take those and basically include a caveat in any of our final reports that says these are financial models that are based on assumptions.
Mr. Vis, I can see you shaking your head, but I actually know what I'm talking about here. I think there are assumptions that are part and parcel of doing any kind of modelling and projections like this. I think we just have to be careful about how we use those.
Thanks.