Thank you very much, Chairman. I'd be happy to address that area.
In 2005 the base, if I might put it that way, for federal commitment to cleaning up contaminated sites was established at $3.5 billion. The most recent budget provided funding in the range of $245 million over the next two years to accelerate the expenditure on cleanup of individual contaminated sites.
This works in the following way. There is a list of sites for which the federal government has direct responsibility or for which it has accepted the liability it bears. These are sponsored, if you like, by a number of departments across the Government of Canada. Some of the major ones would be the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Transport Canada, Fisheries and Oceans, and National Defence.
The role of Environment Canada, which we share with the Treasury Board Secretariat, is to provide the administrative coordination for the entire process across the Government of Canada. In the department, we have very few—virtually none to speak of—on the order of those of other major departments, but we are involved in coordinating the process of, first of all, assessment. These things have to be assessed in terms of how best they can be cleaned up—what the procedures are that have to be undertaken, what the engineering tells us about what needs to be removed, how the contaminated materials can be properly disposed of or stored, etc. So the first phase is the engineering and the assessment; the second phase is the actual remediation. All of these sites, at any given time, will be in one or the other of those two phases of activity.
The funding provided in the recent budget is to accelerate the number of sites. They are, in a sense, in a holding pattern on that list of sites across the Government of Canada, and the additional money will allow us to bring more on stream, either for assessment or for remediation.
I understand that about $800 million has been invested already, so just under $1 billion. At the moment, work is under way on 325 projects, all of which involves about 700 sites, and 120 projects have been completed.
This is a very ambitious long-term undertaking by the Government of Canada. It is happening all the time and in this last budget has in fact been accelerated.