Indeed, some of the issues you just raised are quite pertinent. I guess there's a series of issues.
First, we were looking in terms of infrastructure projects at a wide number of project proponents, each of which may have their own view as to what constitutes a job. Is a three-month job a job? Is it a third of a job, for example? We had no assurance that the job numbers reported would be at all consistent between one proponent and another, and to get consistent data would have taken considerable resources. That's one.
Two, many of the job impacts related to the action plan of course weren't directly related to projects per se, but involved things like tax reductions, increased EI benefits, and other benefits. Those were as equally important in job creation as some of the project-level data.
So we came to the view that in terms of both value for money and expediency, it was better to rely on a model-based macroeconomic approach that could provide a global overview of all the job impacts of the entire program, as well as the indirect impacts that are significant and of course will not be picked up by the reports one would get from individual proponents.
I think by and large our approach has been.... This is always clearly an area of judgment, but I think by and large it's fair to say that the approach we've taken has been, first, consistent with that taken by the U.S. administration. In fact, the Government Accountability Office in the United States has subsequently raised a lot of the issues that we identified with regard to getting project-level data.
I'd also point out that we submitted our overall macroeconomic assessments to a group of private sector forecasters and economists to get their sense of whether they thought what we had done was reasonable, and by and large they indicated that they did.