Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for having me today as part of this distinguished panel. I live in Vancouver, so greetings from British Columbia, where last week the provincial budget brought in the country's first carbon tax, something that I'm sure you'll b

Finance committee  Expenditure revenues are essentially identical to what's in the economic and fiscal update. So those are the government's numbers.

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  Sorry?

Finance committee  We have a separate table, table 3, below the updated status quo framework, which includes both our recommended revenue and our expenditure measures.

Finance committee  It's page 15.

Finance committee  Exactly.

Finance committee  That would be on page 21.

Finance committee  Well, there are two. There's the technical paper, which was really just trying to look at different assumptions around economic growth and at what they meant for the economic and fiscal update as a base case: without any policy action on the part of the federal government, what w

Finance committee  We assume that the effective interest rate on government debt in the 2007-08 year stays constant over the next few years; we project interest payments based on that level. That's built into the status quo framework. A lowering of interest rates would increase the available fiscal

Finance committee  Yes, that's the revised status quo framework. If you forget about any of the recommendations we make in the alternative federal budget, the available fiscal room shrinks to $1 billion if we insert the latest economic projections coming from the Bank of Canada into the economic an

Finance committee  We do not. We do this as an independent process.

Finance committee  The estimates I have for the value of corporate tax cuts are the ones in the economic and fiscal update. And I believe those are not broken out to specify the oil and gas sector.

Finance committee  Thank you. First of all, I would dissent from my co-presenter about the relative merits around productivity of cuts in various taxes. Most of these are based on theoretical propositions around how different taxes affect the economy. The way the modelling works is that because in

Finance committee  The whole reason for the creation of a parliamentary budget office stems from concerns the CCPA raised in its alternative federal budgets, going back almost 10 years. We consistently argued, back when Paul Martin was finance minister, that he was understating revenues and using v