Mr. Speaker, I am touched by my hon. colleague's endorsement of my honesty.
I have been in the Department of Finance something in the order of about 14 months. The more that I am exposed to it the more I realize that the business of projections seems to be far more art than it is science. Certainly, as one gets further out it is way art, and in the near term it is way more science.
The other political parties brag about how they got the numbers right. After everybody else went over the numbers and time had elapsed, they got the numbers right.
A 1% swing in the GDP is a swing of about $2.5 billion in the government's revenue. A 1% change in inflation is something in the order of $800 million. It is an extremely complicated exercise of predicting what a $1.1 trillion economy will do, going out over one year, two years, three years or five years.