Thank you.
This was just brought to my attention now. I do confess that I didn't read that far into the book.
Thank you. That was very helpful.
One thing that's been raised by our party in the House recently--as a complaint, I suppose--with the rollout of money, as it were, is that some of the mayors have indicated they're unable to take advantage of the situation because they can't come up with the matched dollars. The government's response was to make the $2 billion available to loan to the municipality so they can come up with their share.
We're critical of that idea. We would much rather simply remove the matched dollar requirement, or go back to the old days where we used the Canada Pension Plan money to give low-interest loans to municipalities to do infrastructure instead of losing it on the stock market. But that's another story.
Can you tell me why it took so long to have the application form and the details out? If the idea is to have things happening in April, or at least before June, why were the applications made available only yesterday to mayors and municipalities? There were no such forms even available for municipalities to apply for the $2 billion; they didn't exist. Can you tell me about the route that was taken to arrive at this policy that lending money to the municipalities was in some way a good idea?