Government Operations committee  I can't speak for—

Government Operations committee  Since you gave me the opening, I will say that in our report there is a column that looks at in-year updates, and I think those are good things. In fact, the federal government, with its monthly fiscal monitor, provides a service to people who want to keep tabs on what's happenin

Government Operations committee  I'm not familiar with the change you just referred to, so I'm answering a little on the fly. I stand to be corrected if I'm misunderstanding what's behind this change. In general, I would have thought it makes sense to have a tighter reporting cycle. If I go to some of the cons

Government Operations committee  Thank you. I will try not to run over five minutes. Of course I'm happy to answer questions on anything else the C.D. Howe Institute has done, though I do want to say that, on the work I want to profile for you, the work on fiscal transparency, a big motivation is to really rais

Finance committee  I think a shorter budget does make sense. If you look at the provincial budgets, you'll see documents that are much closer to what I described. They're businesslike documents. The key numbers are up front. There is not a lot of commentary—an uncharitable person would say “polit

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. Like you, I suppose, Mr. Chambers, I am struck by the degree to which baseline spending, if we can refer to it that way, has been escalating with every budget and fiscal update, such that when the COVID-related measures recede, we are looking at a fed

Finance committee  The initial response to the pandemic seems to have been reasonably well calibrated to the crisis. In retrospect, we might have overdone it a little in those early months, but everybody clearly remembers how frightening it was and what it was like to be confronting the virus for t

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  Thank you very much. I'll start off, and then I'll turn it over to my colleague Ben Dachis. We appreciate your inviting Ben and me to join you here today, and we hope our contributions will help you and your work on the 2022 federal budget and Bill C‑19. By way of background, f

Finance committee  Thanks for having us.

Finance committee  Well, the concern that I have.... Housing is great, and we have a number of housing experts on this panel who've been emphasizing how important it is, so it feels funny to be complaining about how much residential investment there has been, but the concern expressed in that colum

Finance committee  If there's an afterlife and I ever have a chance to ask God how you should measure housing costs in the consumer price index, I'll be intrigued at the answer, because no human has figured it out. You can weight the value of new houses relatively heavily or you can go to more of

Finance committee  Business investment and productivity growth are very strongly correlated. If you look over time or across countries, you see that in countries where productivity growth is rapid, business investment is high, and in countries where productivity growth is slow, business investment

Finance committee  Well, we may have too much of a good thing. I don't mean to contradict anything that many of the housing experts in this group have been saying, but we have seen spectacular spending on residential investment over the last number of years, especially since the pandemic, and what

Finance committee  I've already said with respect to the fiscal and monetary measures that I think, under the circumstances, they were broadly appropriate. When it comes to whether they were exactly right, I would cut people quite a bit of slack, because they were operating on such a scale and unde