Odd that Bill Curry gives as his example of a PBO study prompted by a request from an Opposition MP the F-35 costing without mentioning the update of the Budget 2015 fiscal outlook that the PBO did in July 2015 at the request of Liberal MP Scott Brison and NDP MP Nathan Cullen. This study was, after all, by his own admission, the road to Damascus moment for Justin Trudeau that suddenly turned him from a leader who would balance every budget to someone promising to run “modest deficits for three years”. The PBO was requested to update the budget estimates for the Bank of Canada’s real GDP projections; otherwise it made only tiny adjustments to the DOF forecast. This turned a $1.5B surplus forecast for 2015-16 into a $1.0B deficit forecast. Trudeau took its projection of a deficit as if it were the word of God, although it wasn’t even the PBO’s best estimate, but only a constrained estimate following specifications from the Liberal and NDP Finance critics.