Industry committee  As I mentioned earlier, Mr. Chair, we are in the process of designing a consultation process with a number of round tables. We have done some preliminary thinking of areas where we want to go back and ask a number of experts across the province where they think there are continue

Industry committee  We develop an evaluation plan for the agency. We have looked at a number of different evaluations in various parts of our programs. While these are still early days for the organization, there has been some significant improvement in job creation activities in those kinds of area

Industry committee  Mr. Chair, I'm going to ask Clair Gartley to respond to that one.

Industry committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair. One interesting thing about this regional agency is that it operates in a very large and diverse economy, in Canadian terms, with a real GDP somewhere in the neighbourhood of $600 billion and a very diverse economic base. One thing is that

Industry committee  No. We're also planning to work with our colleagues in other levels of government. Obviously being based in a regional agency for Ontario and southern Ontario, we have close ties with the provincial government. We've established good working relationships with them in the past. W

Industry committee  In the budget, as the minister mentioned earlier, the agency was renewed for $920 million over the next five years. Over the course of the next months, we're going to conduct a number of round tables across southern Ontario and talk about areas of programming that we may want to

Industry committee  We haven't formalized any plan at this point. We've had some conversations internally within the agency and some preliminary conversations with the minister, but I think we've actually used round tables very effectively in the past. They've actually been a very good way to assemb

Industry committee  Mr. Chair, I'll ask Clair Gartley to talk about that particular program.

Industry committee  With the announcement in budget 2013, there's $920 million for the next five years. The operating budget for the agency, grants and contributions and operating, is $184 million each year. What we don't know at this point is whether or not there will be added elements for infrastr

Industry committee  In terms of budget 2013-14, our actual net for grants and contributions went up $5.9 million year over year, but that was actually a combination of a number of things. We had added $24.8 million for the community innovation infrastructure fund, an increase of $1.5 million for the

Industry committee  It depends which piece we're looking at.

Industry committee  If you look at the main estimates for 2013-14, it's $194 million, and main estimates for 2012 were $188.9 million. That's sort of the year-over-year comparison on the main estimates.

Industry committee  It is a decrease, yes.

Industry committee  Thank you, Minister. With the creation of Shared Services, they picked up the responsibility for looking after phones for the agencies, and e-mails, so the cost you're looking at here in the supplementary (B)s is basically a transfer to them for taking on that service and provid

Industry committee  This will now become part of their ongoing budget going forward.