Thank you. I would be happy to respond to that.
I think I'll just first take a step back and remind members of the economic situation we've been in for the last couple of years. It has been a time of very high economic uncertainty. To be honest, that has made forecasting, both economic and fiscal forecasting, a bit challenging over the last two years.
You're right: there's a significant difference between the budgetary balance forecast for 2010-11, at $49 billion, versus the actual outcome, which was $33.4 billion. That reflected a number of factors. Some of it had to do with economics, and some of it had more to do with the fiscal and the accounting side.
To start, we saw stronger economic growth in 2010 than we expected when we did the March 2010 budget. I'll remind members that when we do our economic forecasts, they're based on an average of private sector forecasts. At that time, the private sector average was forecasting nominal GDP growth; nominal GDP is sort of the broadest single measure of the tax base in the Canadian economy. They were forecasting growth of just under 5% in 2010-11 and the actual number came out closer to 6.3%. So we saw growth on that front that was quite a bit stronger and that helped contribute to some of the results. I think I would agree that it was a good-news story.
We also saw, related to the economic downturn, that unemployment or EI benefits came in lower than we had projected, in part because of that strength of the recovery. We also saw a couple of one-off measures in 2009-10. For example, there was the HST transition assistance to B.C. and Ontario in the March 2010 budget. That was allocated as an expense consistent with the payment schedule, and subsequent to finalizing the public accounts it was determined that this should be expensed all in one year. So that's another factor.
So a number of factors led to the result, but all in all, I would tend to agree that it was a good-news story.
Thank you.