Thank you for the question.
My answer will be brief. First, the librarian and I work in close co-operation, just as we have always done, not only before the changes made to the act in 2017, but also since then.
Now that the act makes it very clear that the Parliamentary Budget Officer must cost measures —a task the library used to do, and may still do, depending on the type of request—this is what we do. If a member of Parliament or a senator asks us to do a cost analysis, an office like ours does not necessarily have all of the analytical capability that the library has, and we function according to a different model. We do not do a confidential cost analysis; if someone asks us to do a confidential cost analysis of a measure, a private member's bill or a motion, my answer will be “no”, because my business model applies to all of Parliament, as prescribed by the act. The library, however, can perform confidential tasks for parliamentarians. There is a whole process between the research service and my office whereby we agree on how to divide up the tasks.
The important point is the cost assessment. I will only do cost assessments for existing measures. If someone tells me that he has an idea and would like a cost analysis done for that idea, I do not have a legislative mandate for that. That would probably be more in keeping with the mandate of the research service of the Library of Parliament.