Finance committee  I think there's a real difference between how much you do and what you do. For example, I advised a different composition of action. I would like to have seen more that dealt with displaced workers and more put into the employment insurance system. If I had a chance right now, fr

Finance committee  I had one other thought. You're supposed to forecast on your anticipated revenues and expenses, but there is also the matter of how you actually budget. One of the points I've made to the minister and to the department on a number of occasions is that we have to build margins int

Finance committee  We just published a paper done by two outside authors, an academic and a former banker, looking at global financial regulation. The premise is, as I'm seeing now in the media, that we have to think about the global requirements but really act on a local basis. I'll give you one o

Finance committee  That's a painful exercise, but I'll go through it. We saw the economy contracting. The forecast we did just before Christmas--we do it on a quarterly cycle, when the national accounts come down, which is when we run the model--saw a contraction of about 0.5% for the country for

Finance committee  Yes, that is for the first quarter, even though, again, we're getting a little bit of good news as we go along. You simply look at all the other factors. The thing that troubles us the most right now is the contraction we're seeing in investment, whether it's through polling or

Finance committee  I think there's actually been a step up on a global basis in oil prices, and we're going to see oil back at maybe $60 a barrel.

Finance committee  Yes, certainly in the first two quarters of this year. There will be a sharp contraction in Q1 and certainly a contraction again, but not quite as sharp, in Q2. Then we get into an area of debate about whether there's going to be enough fiscal stimulus, because infrastructure spe

Finance committee  Q2 is certainly within the forecast. Q3 is an area of debate inside the shop right now, looking at a whole variety of what people would see as extraneous factors, such as inventories. Are they going to go up or down? And how quickly will people start responding to the investment

Finance committee  We're marking it down right now. It'll be much closer to 2%.

Finance committee  It'll be closer to a 2% contraction of the real economy than our previous forecast suggested, simply because we're looking at the investment numbers across the economy and you're seeing a rout in investment plans. I think Ted confirmed that bottom-up analysis from your members. Y

Finance committee  I can't even tell you to the billion. We use very different tools to get there. Don gave you a pretty nice snapshot of how they do it. We actually crank up our model and do the national forecast. We then do a separate fiscal forecast. We use a model-based forecast. As a portable

Finance committee  That's an interesting question. First of all, I think we should be thankful as a country that we did the right thing, resolving our deficit problems back in the mid-1990s. What's really striking to me is the fact that not just the federal government but virtually everybody acro

Finance committee  Absolutely.

Finance committee  That's right.

Finance committee  Parliament just approved the budget for next year, which starts in about 10 days' time.