Finance committee  I'll respond quickly. I think it is helpful to look back. There have been significant revisions to oil prices and commodity prices since the late 2014 period. Now we are at a level where it is unlikely that we are going to see the same kind of downward revisions. I don't think th

Finance committee  Essentially. In late 2014, remember, oil was over $100, and now it is down to $60. Over that period, that's a nominal GDP, I think the revision might be around $80 billion for 2016 or 2017 levels. It is almost like thinking of below $20, maybe $10 per barrel.

Finance committee  In our projection we incorporate the external outlook essentially through the U.S. economy and through commodity prices, as well as the economy of the rest of the world, which we look at, and it is informed by the International Monetary Fund. In our recent projection, we made si

Finance committee  I have spoken to Department of Finance officials, and I don't have direct knowledge of where the $3 billion came from. My guess is that it is essentially a holdover from the $3-billion contingency reserve that was used by previous governments, and it was just easily mapped into r

Finance committee  Our assumption is that the Bank of Canada doesn't start increasing interest rates until the end of 2017. I think this would be consistent with the accommodation of fiscal policy. The Bank of Canada has used the Department of Finance's estimates of the economic impacts on the econ

Finance committee  We don't have the detailed results from the Department of Finance, but we suspect that there are differences in terms of the leakages in the economy. That is to say when there is an increase in aggregate demand that can be met in several ways through increased imports into the ec

Finance committee  That's one of the differences. A rough estimation is that it probably accounts for maybe half of the discrepancy between our budget balance projection and the government's. There would be other underlying assumptions, of tax bases and effective rates, that we don't have to make

Finance committee  I believe that was $81 for WTI.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  If you look at the current assumption for oil prices in the budget, it goes back to $78 per barrel. That's pretty close to the $81 the government had assumed in November. You can compare that with the difference between our budget balances or our nominal GDP. That would be proba

Finance committee  Yes, approximately. It's just a rough calculation.

Finance committee  That estimate actually takes into account, so they would have to...that level of nominal GDP accounts for the risk adjustment.

Finance committee  I don't know that off the top of my head, but I can get back to you.

Finance committee  I would quickly add that when you look at our projection, it sits almost coincidentally in the middle between the Bank of Canada's assumption of $50 for WTI and the private sector forecast of $78. We're at $66. We're almost in the middle. For us, we would think that's relatively

Finance committee  We use our own macro-econometric model to do these projections. The model is similar to that used by the Department of Finance and some at the Bank of Canada, but it's an independent projection. This is our view of where we think the economy will go.