I'll address the capacity concern, and it is a bit of a myth. There's no question that long term we're concerned about labour supply and labour capacity, in particular, because of demographics and the number of people who are going to be retiring. But certainly in the short term, as you mentioned, we've seen a decline in non-residential construction activity; as of December building permits were 31% lower than they were just the previous year. So certainly there is the capacity there.
When we talk about labour shortages, we're talking six to eight years out, because it takes four years to get an apprentice trained to be a journeyperson. That's why college infrastructure is so important for us, because we see a bit of a bottleneck occurring there. We're trying to attract more youth, aboriginal people, and under-represented groups such as women into our industry and we're reaching a bottleneck in the training area. So we're very concerned about that going long term, but short term, certainly, we have the capacity in our industry.
We are aware that infrastructure programs were being elevated in any event, even before this budget. Come April 1 of this year, the municipal Gas Tax Fund doubles. It was phased in for April 1, 2009; it goes to $2 billion and remains there, hopefully in perpetuity, as the minister mentioned.
So from a capacity point of view, we've been planning and we're ready.