Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am following along the same train of questioning. That's the reason we came here, to learn a little bit of what's going on here in Fort McMurray. My perception would have been that everything is rosy; that you guys are floating in money like the federal government does; that you have no problems; and that you're just trying to figure out what to do with all that money. I'm beginning to see that the challenges you face are not dissimilar to other regions of this country. The federal government has to deliver on programs, or deliver programs, but they're normally general programs. They're then put into effect or administered by the provinces or the municipalities.
In particular, Ms. Blake, you seem to be having that problem. I'm trying to understand how we can solve it. The former Liberal government transferred some money with the gas tax, and that was supposed to go to municipalities. I'm not sure if that's enough. I understand that some of the agreements we have in terms of infrastructure are allocated by each province, and then the province decides where those infrastructure moneys should go. But there are challenges. I'm not sure, if we have to set up a program to allocate money to a region like this, how we do it as a government.
That's just on the infrastructure side. We're not speaking about education, training innovation, and the health sector. There are the same problems in cities like Montreal, where doctors are being trained and are being asked to go into the regions and they don't want to go because there is no incentive. Even when they do offer an incentive, it's perhaps a couple of dollars and it's not sufficient enough. You have to help us here.
By the Liberal government signing that health agreement and the provinces deciding where the money should be allocated and prioritized, doesn't that solve the problem? I understand that the federal government should be at the table, but at a certain point the decisions have to be made either regionally or locally. This is a problem that I have in understanding how we're going to make a recommendation to help you guys.
I'm going to close, because I usually don't make a preamble, but I'm amazed. How do we make this thing work? That's without touching on all the other matters that Judy Wasylycia-Leis brought up--housing, mental illness, and all those other things. I don't know.
Go ahead, Ms. Blake.