Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  I very much like your comments. I would actually add another idea into the mix. This will probably not appear in the budget tomorrow, but one of the things we linked into our briefing on green taxes was the idea of an investment tax credit for environmental goods. If we're goin

Finance committee  I think our research shows that the costs, first of all, back up on business. I'll give you a very concrete example, a study we did on the border, trying to measure what happened with Canadian exporters when the U.S. border security went up and it created a barrier. It actually

Finance committee  I don't want to give away everything in my written brief. I'm having a highly reputable outside reader go through it right now. But our thinking is fairly simple, that simpler is better when it comes to the design of a tax system, and right now we do have a patchwork quilt of sal

Finance committee  All of our research points to infrastructure as one of the big unfunded gaps within our economy. If Parliament were going to weigh the various alternatives, clearly a bit more weight on infrastructure is something that the Conference Board would support.

Finance committee  We've seen each other a few times.

Finance committee  We have no endowment, unlike many other think-tanks. In fact, our board has taken a very explicit decision not to have an endowment, not to pursue the money available through trusts, for example. We have to earn our way in the world, and we do that through selling economic foreca

Finance committee  Did we actually formally build that, Matt, into our revenue forecasts? No, we would not have done that in a formal way, because we did our outlook in September. The economic statement came out at the end of October. I think it was October 30. The next time we formally model bot

Finance committee  We have not formally modelled that. We've obviously thought a lot about the advantages of either subsidizing, sustaining the current economy, or trying to find ways to boost productivity over time. Based on my 25 years of experience, my bias is in favour of allowing the market fo

Finance committee  Fundamentally, our view on cutting individual taxes is that cutting personal income taxes is probably a better boost to productivity than cutting sales taxes. I think it's a bit of a stretch to think that by cutting a tax in Canada, somehow we've done something of benefit to Ch

Finance committee  Yes, we're one of the four forecasters of record working for the Department of Finance, providing an independent fiscal outlook. When the government published the economic statement last fall, we were one of the four forecasters—

Finance committee  I'll start. That is part of the government's fiscal plan, but we have not bottled that in any formal way as of yet, because the move to 15% obviously depends upon healthy fiscal outcomes and healthy growth on an ongoing basis. So it's a plan. I spent 10 years at the Department

Finance committee  That's right. The last time we ran our numbers in a formal way, that Matt actually modelled, was in mid-September.

Finance committee  Well, one of the joys of economic forecasting is that you always get more information. That's why we do our economic forecast four times a year: to try to take advantage of the national accounts data and do the updates. I would say that the numbers I gave you for next year are

Finance committee  He didn't do an independent number for revenues, but I think we can assume, for example, that spending is pretty much under control.