Thank you for the question, sir.
First of all, I'll just comment about the reputation of the Congressional Budget Office: it is stellar. It is a highly used institution, perhaps even a model that we can aspire to, even though it exists within a very different system, a congressional system versus our Westminster system.
I don't have statistics today to tell you how the Congressional Budget Office has fared in terms of its projections one, two, or three years out relative to the executive, or in fact even relative to other forecasts that are provided in the United States. Having said that, I think one of the things we will seek to understand is how the Congressional Budget Office has built its capacity over time in producing those kinds of forecasts and maintaining that kind of independent, non-partisan approach.
In terms of other countries, I believe a paper was produced by the Library of Parliament that looked at what exists in other countries that is similar in nature to the Parliamentary Budget Officer role in Canada. Of those institutions, the Congressional Budget Office actually has the longest history, starting in the mid-1970s. You've actually seen quite a few countries start to build this type of capacity in recent years, particularly over the past decade or decade and a half. We've seen it in Korea, in Sweden, in the Philippines, and in the Netherlands. The U.K. has built a scrutiny office. Not all of them actually produce independent forecasts; some of them do, some of them don't. I apologize; I don't have an understanding of how their forecast records would compare with their executives' or with the private sector forecasts.
Underlying the provision of this advice, what we would hope to do in looking at forecasting information is provide a good sense of what's behind those forecasts in terms of assumptions--what the differing assumptions are, what the related risks are, and how they would impact budgetary choices.