Finance committee  It'll provide stimulus to the economy.

Finance committee  Of course. That's the whole point behind a stimulus package. You're adding stimulus of between 1.5% to 2% of GDP, and--

Finance committee  Well, the stimulus won't be as great. That's a very simple arithmetic exercise. We think the government is going to be challenged, frankly, in regard to getting the machinery in place to ensure, for example, that the infrastructure spending happens by summer or early fall. Whether it's $12 billion or $20 billion, when you add the provinces in, it's a challenge to get that new money out the door.

Finance committee  We've been on the record for a long time calling for a single regulator. I think Finn has made the case: it's all about efficiency--improving efficiency, information flow--but it wouldn't have solved the problem. It wouldn't have prevented the problem from happening, unless they suddenly had better foresight than everybody else in the world.

Finance committee  Our forecast is very much driven by an economic model that we run four times a year. We run it every quarter. So we ran it in September, in the middle of the financial crisis. We actually did the reforecasting two weeks later.

Finance committee  Ninety? Frankly, I can't give you a number because our forecast is not done yet, and of course the forecast is critical for revenue growth for government, assuming that spending is as planned. But it's really all the impact to the revenue side of the slowdown that we're seeing right now in investment across the country.

Finance committee  Well, why don't I speak to our forecast, what's happening right now? I have 32 guys back at the shop who model everything in the country, and we do our forecasts on a quarterly cycle. What we're seeing happen right now in the economy is a very sharp impact on investment. We're now heading into a period where Canada could have a worse quarter than the United States by a lot.

Finance committee  Mr. Mulcair, thank you very much for the question. Frankly, we are in a grand experiment right now. None of us has ever seen this before. That's part of the reason Don and I have such huge challenges with the economic forecast right now. By the way, ours will be out in two weeks.

Finance committee  You have to be prepared to reduce principal, to actually mark down the face value of the loans, because if people can only afford to pay 80¢ on the dollar, there is no point in pursuing them for two decades trying to get 100¢ back. It just won't work. You can reduce interest rates, but their stock and debt is really the critical issue.

Finance committee  We put out a brief in the spring calling for harmonization of sales taxes built largely on the good work that the C.D. Howe Institute has done, because we agreed with all that analysis. I think one of the big challenges to this point has been the revenue shock that Ontario's going to experience.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm going to do something a bit different. I want to touch on four points in about five minutes. The first one is on what the U.S. is doing, because it's an interesting case study on the biggest credit crisis I think the world has ever faced. The second one is comparing where we are.

International Trade committee  There is certainly a need for Canada to engage Latin America in a much deeper way, and that's why pursuit of free trade on a regional or sub-regional basis would be my preferred route. But clearly there are things to be done to try to move forward the agenda of transparency, democracy, respect for human rights, and the whole gambit of issues within Latin America.

International Trade committee  Unfortunately, right now in Latin America there's a habit of changing definitions if you don't like the outcome. In fact, the Argentine government has done exactly the same thing around inflation. Measured inflation is announced at 8%; it's probably more like 25%. So the answers are no and no; of course you don't fiddle with definitions in order to get the outcomes you want.

International Trade committee  First of all, thank you very much for referencing our research. That's why we do it, to try to inform the debate in Canada. On the issue of fitting into regional value chains, Canada is clearly on a plateau in the Canada-U.S. relationship; that's why we keep putting that forward as the single most important trading relationship.

International Trade committee  Well, just going from memory, I think we've only had four bilateral agreements up to EFTA in the last fourteen years. I think we have bilaterals with Chile, Costa Rica, Israel, and EFTA becomes the fourth. You can compare that to what countries like Australia or China have done, where they have 30 to 35 agreements.