Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Thanks, but I'm not an expert on oil prices. I believe in the April 2015 MPR from the Bank of Canada, the assumption for WTI oil prices was $50 a barrel for the next three years, so out to 2017. As you know, oil prices are quite volatile and play an important role in the Canadia

Finance committee  Underlying our projection for oil prices is that they are really just based on futures prices. This reflects the beliefs of financial markets and people who are trading and betting on oil prices. In comparison to the private sector average, yes, it is lower, but I think it's als

Finance committee  It's a very gradual increase from about $52 on average over 2015 to $64 in 2019, and ultimately our end point would be at the end of 2020, which would be $66.

Finance committee  These projections are based on our macroeconomic model, and it requires a lot of assumptions on the U.S. economy, commodity prices, as well as monetary and fiscal policy—

Finance committee  Okay. No, our projection is an independent projection.

Finance committee  It would be difficult to respond to them without having their projections and their detailed assumptions to allow us to reconcile the differences. Probably, the important point is that there is some uncertainty around the year that the budget returns to balance, but the direction

Finance committee  If you were to compare the differences between the current private sector outlook and our outlook, I think you could explain those differences by looking to the impacts that we have. Perhaps private sector forecasters have a different estimate or are underestimating the impact of

Finance committee  I agree it's a fundamental question, but that's beyond the scope of the mandate of our analysis. It's an extremely interesting question. It's being debated everywhere around the world at this moment. As much as I would like to respond, I will not respond.

Finance committee  I agree with that statement. It's not the underlying assumption in our work that the government should be increasing spending. What we're trying to provide here is an impact analysis of what could be some of the implications of these decisions, much like the government did in its

Finance committee  I would just say that the difference between our projection for nominal GDP and the government's risk adjusted is minimal. This is $8 billion on average, or 0.4%. We would consider that to be broadly in line. What's changed really, if I just point you to figure 2-13, is that the

Finance committee  Sure. Those 67,000 jobs are related exclusively to the measures that were in the 2012 and the 2013 action plans. All the other factors that underlie the increase that we see of 500,000 or 600,000 jobs would be affecting those, but this is an all else equal, holding everything els

Finance committee  Yes, on average, they're the same.

Finance committee  Domestically we're using the indicators for, let's say, Statistics Canada, to build up our near-term outlook for all of the sectors of the economy, for example, consumer spending, residential construction, and for business investment as well. We have a more detailed approach for

Finance committee  Again, in the case of the U.S., you mentioned the sequestering. Our current projection lines up pretty closely to the IMF's. According to the IMF's projection for the U.S., their assumption is that the sequester will take off about a half a percentage point of growth in 2013, so