The Parliamentary Budget Office has frequently complained, ever since its creation by the Harper government in 2006, that the Department of Finance, where budget officer Kevin Page used to work, refuses to give it the data that it needs to do its job. It complained about that again today in the PBO's assessment of last week's federal budget [PDF]:
“… although the use of private sector forecasts enhances the independence and, therefore, the credibility of the Government’s fiscal projections, the Government’s established practice of not providing the assumptions used by the Department of Finance Canada to translate the private sector economic forecast of these indicators into fiscal projections, as well as details regarding planned and approved program spending by departments, impedes a complete assessment of the reasonableness of the Government’s fiscal projections.
This lack of transparency was highlighted in the 2005 Review of Canadian Fiscal Forecasting and IMF staff have also noted that the Government “could enhance the understanding of budgetary forecasts by providing more information on the assumptions and methods underlying the translation of the macroeconomic outlook into fiscal projections.”2 A complete assessment of the fiscal outlook presented in Budget 2010 requires this additional information.”