Finance committee  Yes. The fact that it was a non-announced measure in the budget suggests it's more advanced and they will have to find—

Finance committee  I don't understand that type of reaction, being an economist, but yes, apparently it happens.

Finance committee  I don't think we have that level of granularity, because there are thousands of projects in Infrastructure Canada's database and we have not gone through each and every one of them and made that judgment call.

Finance committee  A debt anchor can be defined in a few ways. It could be the absolute level of debt or it could be the debt in proportion to the size of the economy. The government has chosen to opt for the second version: federal debt as a proportion of the economy. The government's stated goal is for the debt to stand at 31.9% of GDP.

Finance committee  Yes. These types of government policies that have been announced and implemented are included in our forecast.

Finance committee  Yes, we have factored in immigration levels, and our demographic assumptions are based on those from StatsCan. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, of course—

Finance committee  —but yes, they are included.

Finance committee  When we do our reports on infrastructure programs, we have used the government's definition of infrastructure because of the nature of the program, the number of infrastructure projects. We have not decided what should be counted as infrastructure and what should not be classified as infrastructure, because the objective of our report was to determine whether there was incrementality in provincial spending or not.

Finance committee  We don't have specific examples because we looked at macro levels. What that means is that we looked at provincial and territorial investment plans when they were available, as well as at municipal plans, pre-announcement and post-announcement. In the presence of incrementality, the pre-federal announcement plans should have been augmented or bonified to take advantage of the federal plan.

Finance committee  There was some level of displacement, but we didn't do the microanalysis, looking project by project, because I would have needed much more analysis and many more analysts than the number we have.

Finance committee  That sounds like something very plausible that has probably happened at least in part. To say that it has entirely displaced provincial or municipal spending—or the opposite—is probably too strong, but it has happened at least in part, based on what we found in our reports.

Finance committee  I don't remember off of the top of my head. Maybe Jason has a better memory than I do because he's younger, but maybe not.

Finance committee  No, we don't take that into account when we look specifically at the infrastructure programs. We take that into account when we do our macroeconomic projections, but when we look specifically at infrastructure programs we don't take that into account, because that would require second- and third-order impacts, and it would require dynamically estimating the impacts of these programs, which would be significantly more complex.

Finance committee  What I'd say is that we have not been made aware of any instances where provinces, territories or municipalities did not cough up their share of the program funding that they were supposed to provide under the agreements. What we have seen at the aggregate impact is that some provinces and territories have displaced a portion of the funding in order for them to meet the matching requirements.

Finance committee  I wouldn't call it worrisome, but I wouldn't call it normal either. As I mentioned in my opening statement, our projections assume that no new measures or major policy changes are introduced. For our projections, we assume a status quo in policy actions. We look at the effects of economic changes over the long term that are a bit more predictable, such as demographic changes.