Finance committee  Certainly, that's an issue. As Chris mentioned earlier, they look at the households in detail, at the micro level, and that's their conclusion. What we have looked at has been at more of an aggregate level, but for a similar conclusion.

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  Sorry, household imbalances in what sense?

Finance committee  Sorry, that $300 million is in GDP.

Finance committee  Yes, that's correct.

Finance committee  I wasn't sure exactly what the question was, but what we did in that case was we looked at the overall impact of the two tax changes the government proposed. The additional work was on reusing the tax rate for the first bracket. We looked at that because everyone will benefit from the changing of that tax.

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  That's the estimate from the Department of Finance. The multiplier is 1.2.

Finance committee  It's a very simple calculation, actually, because there is a 68% exemption without this right now, and moving it to 100% is just closing up the amount that has already been calculated for the 68%, which is around $400 million. The additional cost would be around $190 million.

Finance committee  Exactly.

Finance committee  No, we don't.

Finance committee  As my colleague mentioned earlier, the reason for this prudence factor or contingency or however you call it—it has been called various things—is to try to cover the risk in the economic forecast. That risk has to be based on previous practice, the history of forecasts over many years, to see what the probabilities are of those forecasts and how much risk you want to assume for them.

Finance committee  As I mentioned earlier, the families were selected by the member that requested the—

Finance committee  I agree with you in the sense that's why we said in the report that those families are not representative of the population. Those are picked by the member. Those are the results. We could have expanded the analysis and done other things, but at the time, given many specific resource constraints, we did not expand the question.

Finance committee  We haven't really done any analysis of the impact of infrastructure spending specifically on the economy. Certainly infrastructure spending, like any other spending, has a multiplier impact, and typically infrastructure spending multiplies a bit more than some other measures, but we haven't really done our own analysis of the impact on the Canadian economy specifically for infrastructure.