Finance committee  Oh, sure.

Finance committee  No. It could be hard to predict. There's an objective in mind—

Finance committee  I can't remember magnitudes. We'd have to come back to the committee with the actual citations, but there was basically no significant effect.

Finance committee  Yes, to the extent.... It's hard to separate these out from.... There was no real number attached that it increased activity by x percent.

Finance committee  I'm sorry; do you mean before those measures were introduced?

Finance committee  To be fair, it can be difficult to tell, because it's hard.... You have a particular level of activity, let's say in children's physical participation or their participation in artistic and cultural activities. You may have a certain trend, but then you introduce the measure, and it's generally applicable.

Finance committee  It's a really good question. One thing is that the tax system by its very nature is of general application. I think this government has shown interest in pilot programs, in experimentation. That doesn't work very well in the tax system, because if we introduce a tax credit, it's open to everyone who qualifies; it's not the idea of having it available to some and not to others within a group, just to be able to tease out....

Finance committee  The statistics we had were quite similar to the ones that Mr. May.... The data is relatively limited, to be fair, so we looked at the same survey from Ipsos Reid, done for the Red Cross. It's the same thing: 18% of adults, spreading that over three years.

Finance committee  Are you thinking specifically of first aid or are you thinking of something—

Finance committee  It's often context-specific, and if we were to look at a different measure in a different context, what you could infer from that could be pretty limited, or you'd have to make some pretty strong assumptions to take findings from a tax credit for a different activity in Estonia.

Finance committee  Yes, it would be quite good in Estonia. It's a pretty small population, so we'll see what Estonia is doing.

Finance committee  I would say it depends. If we look at tax expenditures across the board, some have been evaluated because they're used in many countries. You asked about other countries. In the case of charitable donation tax credits, for example, there is a pretty broad body of evidence suggesting that charitable donations are sensitive to tax incentives.

Finance committee  Yes, it will be pretty short. First of all, thanks very much for having us on this important issue. It's a pleasure to be here. I think you've hit a lot of these issues already in a general way. We see ourselves as here to assist the committee in your review of this bill, and we thought it would be useful to explain the general framework or lens through which we in the tax policy branch evaluate tax credits like this one when they're presented to us.

Finance committee  I would say that our colleague from ESDC is better placed to answer. He is on later. I might just pause that question.

Finance committee  On your first question, as you say, in the fall economic statement we reported that the cost of indexing in the 2020-21 fiscal year would be $505 million, and in the 2021-22 fiscal year it would be $1.2 billion. On your second question, the government didn't make the decision until after the first budget implementation act, Bill C-15, was tabled in Parliament.