Finance committee  There were multipliers for different kinds of spending that were reported at the time. We have taken into account different spending and applied different multipliers to that. There is a range of multipliers that the Department of Finance has used for different parts of the spend

Finance committee  Well, the IMF provided the study that showed that during a financial crisis multipliers actually may be somewhat larger. Our assumption is that the Department of Finance, in calculating these multipliers after the financial crisis of 2008, actually took into account the special c

Finance committee  Our major trade partner is still the U.S., and what's happened in the U.S. definitely has had a huge impact on the Canadian economy. We provided a projection for the U.S. economy. It is still below par. They have a huge excess capacity and output gap. For now, over a five-year pe

Finance committee  Our model uses the U.S. as the main external economy affecting the Canadian economy. In general, when we are doing the forecast, we take into account the overall global picture. We normally look at the IMF World Economic Outlook to see what kind of a projection they have for the

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  Do you mean in our fiscal sustainability...?

Finance committee  We believe so. The Finance Department released their first aging report last year, which was done over a 50-year period. We do it over a 75-year period. They didn't call it a fiscal gap. There was a number in one footnote that looked very similar to the fiscal gap measures that w

Finance committee  Yes, they use essentially the same factors. We did a comparison between our Fiscal Sustainability Report last year and the Department of Finance's report. We provided that publicly and it's available. The numbers seemed very close.

Finance committee  If they go into default, there will be a huge implication on their borrowing rates. The borrowing rates of Ontario would be a major element in the overall Canadian picture, given that it's the largest province in Canada. Overall, there is only one taxpayer; it will affect everybo

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  Our mandate is not to look at provincial finance. We do that in the context of sustainability, but we look at the provinces as a whole, not province by province. We don't have the resources to go province by province and it is not consistent with our mandate.

Finance committee  This is a standard way of measuring fiscal sustainability. The OECD and the IMF and all the other countries do exactly the same thing. The measure we use is to take the debt-to-GDP ratio of a jurisdiction, whether it's the provincial or the federal government, for the time being

Finance committee  Of course, the cuts are relative to what it would have been. I mean, those things are still growing at the GDP rate, but they're cut to what they would have been.

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  We did a study to try to decompose the total wage bill of federal institutions. It was, in total, about 95% of the total institutions, based on the data we had. On that basis, we found that the main driver of growth in the total wage bill was the increase in the number of employe