Finance committee  There are certainly different fiscal anchors one can use. There is the adjusted deficit, the deficit as a percentage of GDP, debt as a percentage of GDP—these are all different measures that people use. In our case, we are looking at this because the government is using this meas

Finance committee  This is an assumption we made to be able to do this calculation, but different provinces have different systems now. There is a carbon tax in some areas and there are different ways of dealing with that. We didn't really want to do separate calculations for each province. We assu

Finance committee  We have looked at the study that was done by the Ecofiscal Commission. In order to estimate the impact of this, we used some of its calculations. What we are assuming in our calculation is that this tax will be essentially going back as a lump sum to households in any form. That

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, Mr. Vice-Chairs, and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting us to appear before the committee to discuss our April 2018 economic and fiscal outlook. The parliamentary budget officer, or PBO, supports Parliament by provi

Government Operations committee  Well, that's one of the reasons we provided that guideline for parties to look at, and requested they give us some comments on it. Certainly there are limits on what we can do, and how fast we can do those things during the election period. There will be cases where we have to re

Government Operations committee  For example, if a party comes the last day before the election, we obviously won't be able to do it.

Government Operations committee  Not only do we have to have the time to do the analysis, we have to get it translated, and have the option to have the time to release it publicly. So, you can't really do it within two or three days before the election.

Government Operations committee  From the beginning, when this idea came up, we had some concerns. The main concern is really the independence and the impartiality of the office that we are a bit worried about because we are being involved in an election process. There are people who think that having independe

Finance committee  Concerning the contingency fund, or whatever—the prudence factor—you're right. The name has changed over many years. There have been different definitions of this, but the bottom line is that it is just to protect against any kind of downside risk for the economy and possible cha

Finance committee  What this study does is that it provides a scenario. If you maintain the current fiscal structure for those provinces that are not sustainable, then you are going to see an increase in the debt ratio over time—in some cases significantly. Again, this is a scenario. It's not neces

Finance committee  Whether we are going to pull as much investment as the Americans is very hard to say. That depends on many different factors.

Finance committee  We certainly, as Chris mentioned, have been pleasantly surprised by the rise in investment in Canada in the past few quarters. Hopefully that will continue, but again these kinds of things depend on many different factors. Global factors are most definitely one of them, but typic

Finance committee  We do this exercise every year just to show what happens in the long run if the current fiscal structure is maintained over a very long period of time, 75 years. We impose on that the demographic projections that essentially show the aging of population in Canada, both for the co

Finance committee  As Chris mentioned earlier, we haven't taken into account explicitly in our projection the issue of trade and uncertainty with NAFTA and the negotiations with the United States, because it's very hard to know exactly what is going to happen and how the negotiations are going to e

Finance committee  Certainly. The stronger U.S. demand will certainly boost our exports. That's always the case. We are highly integrated with the U.S. economy, so any positive change in the U.S. will affect us positively.