Finance committee  I used to work for Mr. Page. I'm surprised he said that. That sounds very critical. Honestly, I'm happy to walk through any part of this with you or with Mr. Page. We do feel that it's a pretty good accounting of the financial aspects of the plan. Particularly in the fall econo

Finance committee  Of course we're continuing to update this. We feel that at the time of the FES, we put out the most accurate information we had. We're continuing to work on updating that. We'll put out a budget at some point in the spring. We will have updated figures at that time.

Finance committee  If no one else from my department can answer at this time, we can try to follow up. I'm not personally familiar with that particular issue.

Finance committee  I can say a little. I'm reaching for my notes from the fall economic statement. We did quite a bit of analysis to try to estimate those impacts. For example, if you look at page 38 of our fall economic statement, we have some estimates of how the real GDP and the unemployment ra

Finance committee  Is that better?

Finance committee  We estimate, for example, economic activity being about 4.5% higher in 2020 and 4.5% higher in 2021, compared to a scenario that would have occurred in the absence of that support measure. We estimate that this translates into about 1.2 million full-time equivalent jobs protected

Finance committee  You're absolutely right that interest rates are at an all-time low and that certainly makes these kinds of investments a lot less costly than they would otherwise be. I'll note that we're really not alone in Canada in this kind of a response. This is the kind of advice we've re

Finance committee  That's a really big question and I think we'll be giving that a lot of thought. One thing we know is that one of the reasons we had to go ahead with a fairly blunt approach to the emergency recovery benefit, the CERB, was that we had a failure of ESDC's EI system. I think we've

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, we thought we would just go straight to questions.

Government Operations committee  Maybe I'll take that answer. Yes, we were providing those estimates as required by the emergency response act, although we went a little bit beyond the requirements of the act—

Government Operations committee  If there were to be some kind of requirement imposed on us, we certainly would. But I would also mention that we are preparing a fall update, as mentioned in the Speech from the Throne—

Government Operations committee  Typically, we would have a budget in the spring—

Government Operations committee  I don't think we have a date, but what comes out this fall—

Government Operations committee  I don't think the decision can be made at this point, but we are studying these issues. We're looking at the economics and discussing the economic issues with private sector economists. There is a great deal of uncertainty with respect to the whole set of issues around the evolut

Government Operations committee  I appreciate the comment. We're certainly doing that work. That work is under way and we know there is a lot of interest.