Health committee  That is certainly a possibility. If that's the wish of the committee, yes, we can certainly do that.

Health committee  Whether the system—the government and Parliament—is willing to accept that or not is something that has to be decided by you.

Health committee  It depends on what the political choices are. That is not the kind of thing we provide comments on. That's a political decision. It is the parliamentarians' and the government's decision in looking at the trade-off between different policies and different issues, and then looking at the cost of that and whether the system can accept that cost.

Health committee  In what sense is it unsustainable? Actually, the federal government's overall fiscal situation is sustainable, based on the reports we have done on its overall sustainability. In fact, there is fiscal room. This is a long-term assessment, not a medium-term assessment. We are talking about the long run, given the population aging in Canada.

Health committee  There are two parts to it. The snapshot of where we are is a matter of looking at the data that is available to see exactly where we are. That's something we can certainly look at. Advice on how to fund the program is something that's outside of our mandate. We do not deal with policy, and there are good reasons for that.

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  Let me first apologize for being late. Certainly the savings from the pharmacare program have to be the main reason that you want to have a pharmacare program; otherwise, it would not make any sense economically, so one has to find a way to estimate that. I think the range of estimates that you put in the model, the final estimates from that, would be the main factor that would determine the range of savings that you're going to get from the pharmacare program.

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  Certainly our costing would be an independent costing. Whether the results we get would be close to or different from those results I cannot speculate right now, before we start doing the work.

Finance committee  The government had an estimate itself in the budget, and we did our own calculation, which was somewhat lower than what the government had estimated. Their estimate was about 100,000 and our estimate was about 60,000 jobs, extra jobs.

Finance committee  That depends on where you spend it, because each dollar, depending on where you spend it, has a different impact on the economy and the amount of activity it creates. One has to look at that and take that into account.

Finance committee  We haven't done the calculation to tell you what the cost of this job creation—

Finance committee  As we mentioned earlier, that's just to cover the risk, the outside risk of the private sector protection. Whatever that risk is coming from remains to be seen, but that is what it is for.

Finance committee  Based on our calculation and estimate, the policies they have put in place will increase the level of activities and increase the number of jobs, and that would not be the case based on our own estimation.

Finance committee  We normally do not actually make comments on Bank of Canada reports. They have done their reports and they're out there. If there is anything that is related to the work that we do, then obviously we take that into account, but we do not necessarily go out and release a report commenting on the Bank of Canada.