Thank you very much.
I'd like to thank you all for being here. It must have been a long day for you all.
This is interesting. We've got three volumes to go through, and we've all been appointed just recently, so we had to scatter through. So you'll have to bear with us if we ask you questions that you may have already addressed.
As you stated, the Public Accounts of Canada is a major accountability report, and I see that for the tenth year in a row we've had an unqualified statement, which is very good. And in the past we've had surpluses with good economic management and good forecasting predictions so we can pay down the debt, which has been slowly coming down, which is a good thing, and we want to be able to put some money into contingency. But I have a question. This question pertains to paragraph 1.11, where you talk about risk and uncertainties. When one looks at the past, when we had to move from the real problematic situations the government was in in 1993, it had to do a proper projection, it had to take risks into consideration, it had to ensure that the management or the competency with which it predicted its figures were well taken care of, because otherwise programs would be at risk.
When we looked at the fall economic statement, which predicted a surplus despite the fact that we were aware that the economic downturn in the United States was going to affect us, and that the financial institution was going through a downturn, what sort of methodology or what were some of the parameters you used at the Treasury Board that gave the government the thought process that it was going into a surplus, and then suddenly projected a deficit a few weeks later of $30 billion? Could you just explain that to me?
Thank you.