Public Accounts committee  Actually, Mr. Sahir Khan will take that question. Thank you, sir.

Public Accounts committee  Sir, when we provided.... When we are working with proprietors in this sort of case, we work with standard definitions of operating and support. We are working from U.S. definitions, which map very closely, as we highlighted in our opening remarks in our text.

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, sir, for the question. The model that we used in the report, which is actually described in some detail—certainly the model and the assumptions—is what we would call a cost-estimating relationship model. We're historically extrapolating costs on fighter planes. We

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. By way of introduction, I have Peter Weltman, one of the principal authors of our F-35 work. Tolga Yalkin, senior analyst, is another principal author of our F-35 work. Mr. Sahir Khan is the assistant parliamentary budget officer for expenditure and revenue

Finance committee  Sir, on the commodity prices, effectively we were using the Bank of Canada commodity price index. If you look at the data, the latest releases of the Bank of Canada commodity price index for March 2012, you will see year-over-year declines of the overall index, probably of about

Finance committee  You'll also see declines in agriculture, energy, forestry, etc.

Finance committee  I think it just a language issue. I think both what you're saying and—

Finance committee  Sir, just to be short, we also do this for a living. We look at the average private sector forecast. We benchmark all the time against the average private sector forecast, including in our reports. When we made the decision to move away from average private sector forecasts, we

Finance committee  The analysis we provide very much follows the same methodology provided by the Department of Finance in the 2009 budget, the 2010 budget, and the 2012 budget—it's an aggregate number. We have not broken out estimates for what the impact would be in Ottawa. We've undertaken an exe

Finance committee  More generally, I think it speaks to a question and our response provided, I think to Mr. Hoback, that there could be some.... We're taking some tough actions now, reducing our debt-to-GDP ratio, and there will be initial drag in the short term. I think Chris was quoting some pri

Finance committee  If we freeze the direct program spending in nominal terms, it's somewhere in the neighbourhood of $115 billion, so we're saying almost flat or negative growth over the next five years. That direct program spending, as you say, will fall very dramatically. The question for us, an

Finance committee  We have no comment. We have no analysis. Again, we are trying to do the distribution analysis, department by department, but I think the government is quite focused on trying to do this operationally. Mr. Jean talked about that. We were going to look at that. What are the plans

Finance committee  When we provide these estimates, we want to be clear to Parliament where we think the economy is vis-à-vis potential. We're saying right now, as we look in this particular context today, that we're probably operating somewhere about two percentage points below potential. The IMF

Finance committee  I'll defer to Chris to provide the page numbers in the announcement, but I think as Chris said earlier, what we provide in our tables are figures that are provided on a net basis. When we're talking about jobs, we're talking about net jobs. When the government spends additional m