Mr. Chair, we just received word approximately three weeks ago on our stimulus funding package, which was about $36 million, but we had been dealing through the federal government since April on project applications to get them approved. There was a lot of back-and-forth and there were some serious delays over the summer months.
As I mentioned in my notes, we submitted two applications, one for a four-pad arena, which was rejected. We never received anything official, but unofficially it was rejected because the federal government didn't think we could complete that project by March 31, 2011, even though we were more than confident. We had projected that it would be open by September 2010. The second list of projects was for paving and street works in the Halifax and Dartmouth area, which was worth about $30 million. They told us that those projects wouldn't qualify.
So in the final analysis.... And I think a lot of it was motivated by the possibility of an election, because things started happening much more quickly over the last month, let's say. We did get approvals, but as I mentioned in my speaking notes, it's too late to get any of those projects under way in this construction season, so it will be next spring before we get them under way.