Maybe I can unparcel that question into a few components.
To provide some context, I know from previous testimony that the recommendation has been to create an EIA type of institution here in Canada. Just to be clear, my understanding is that the budget for the EIA in its 2017 fiscal year was $122 million U.S. By contrast, the energy statistics budget within Statistics Canada is $4.6 million. To be fair, we're comparing apples and oranges, because we don't do forecasting and we have an existing statistical infrastructure that we can leverage in order to do our work, but there's an order of magnitude of difference there.
We already have the instruments in place to share data with provinces. Sections 11 and 12 of the Statistics Act give us the authority to share data with statistical focal points or with other provincial organizations, and we do with almost all provinces. Section 13 of our act gives us the authority to acquire administrative data from any level of government and any organization, and we exercise that as well, so there is already data moving between jurisdictions.
What we don't have, which we have in other subject matter areas, is the same types of consultative bodies that we may have in other areas. For instance, we have an agricultural statistics advisory committee that includes experts from the field. We have a federal-provincial-territorial committee on agricultural statistics as well, and we work closely with the provinces through that vehicle.