And this question of credibility becomes that much more acute when comparing the DPE forecasts of the first eight years of the current federal government (assuming it wins the 2019 election and discretionary spending comes in line with its latest forecast) and the last eight years of the prior regime. [...] While only a modest update to its past forecasts to reflect changes in the economic outlook, it drew some attention from the media and other commentators as a result of its marked difference from the fiscal outlooks of the Department of Finance Canada (2017a) and the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) (2017a). [...] This reflected the fact that the federal government’s outlook for DPE growth, as presented in the FES 2017, looks strangely similar for the first eight years of the current administration (assuming its wins the 2019 election and discretionary spending comes in line with its latest forecast) and the last eight years of the prior regime (Chart 1). [...] The information in the Fiscal Monitor can be further augmented by the appropriations voted on by parliamentarians in the Main and Supplementary Estimates (the Estimates) for the current fiscal year, thereby helping to round out and benchmark the information contained in the Fiscal Monitor. [...] In order to ensure that information from the Fiscal Monitor and the Estimates is captured in the IFSD’s in-year forecast of total transfer payments, the IFSD used the simple average of these respective forecasts and estimates.