Industry committee  No, it's not, under the current contribution agreements, which expire in 2014. There's an expectation that the design of that program may be reviewed in the upcoming budget.

Industry committee  No, we haven't. We rely on Health Canada to undertake that kind of research. We simply don't have that expertise.

Industry committee  No.

Industry committee  To clarify, I'm not suggesting that FCM's position is that there is going to need to be government funding, core contributions toward building out these networks in areas where the market would otherwise not support that.

Industry committee  For sure. We're not working on anything that is specific to broadband services right now, but we have a program funded through Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development to help municipalities and adjacent first nations communities develop shared service agreements, in particula

Industry committee  We represent 2,000 municipalities, which together represent 90% of the population of Canada. I'm going off the top of my head. The top 150 municipalities in our membership are over 100,000. We're just doing the math here. It's about 1,500. The demographics of our members are over

Industry committee  I was talking about a trend over the last 20 years that has seen federal and provincial responsibilities downloaded onto municipalities, and in turn.... It's mainly provincial transfers and territorial transfers to municipalities being cut.

Industry committee  Actually, in the last seven or eight years, starting in 2005, there's been a real turnaround in federal support for cities and communities, mainly for infrastructure investments.

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  As Daniel mentioned earlier, we think that governments—federal, municipal—should identify the needs in areas like that, the resources required to meet those needs or close those gaps. FCM's position is that those funds should be allocated from wherever and however they should be.

Industry committee  Well, as I said, because we haven't spent a lot of time focusing on the opportunities in urban areas, we don't have a lot of information. Surely the Canadian wireless and telegraph association would, because they've been doing a lot of work on that, and likely the chamber and oth

Industry committee  Probably not specifically on that issue; frankly, most of our work, especially on the deployment and use of broadband technologies, has been focused on rural and northern communities. That's not because what's happening in urban communities is less important, but simply because

Industry committee  I would say that the experience is mixed. Certainly, I think it's safe to say that, in general, especially the larger Canadian cities simply aren't keeping up with their counterparts in this area, for the simple fact that most municipalities are struggling to keep up with increas

Industry committee  That's for sure. Certainly, the situation you describe is a very common one that municipalities experience, in that everyone wants services, but very few people want to host the potentially negative impacts of delivering that service locally. Sometimes it's called NIMBYism—not

Finance committee  Very quickly, to answer your question about leveraging, yes, municipalities are using the gas tax fund to fund larger projects that they take debt on to cover, and then use future gas tax fund payments to pay the debt obligations of that loan. It allows people to fund much larger