Thank you Mr. Chairman.
Good morning Mr. Perrault. Good morning gentlemen.
Mr. Perrault, you are the mayor of a large city in Quebec. I'm happy to meet you. I'm not sure if you were here earlier, when we met with the minister. I told him that I was rather anxious to see some work get started so as to stimulate our economy. This is something that should have been done last fall. In any case, the minister offered his reassurance and told me that he had received a large number of projects and that work could begin quite soon.
However, you said earlier that you were ready to sit down with the minister. That means that there has been no communication between you and the minister, and I would like to ask you why that is the case. You are president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. Do you have a role to play? I expressed some concerns earlier. For example, it may be that there are not enough projects that are shovel-ready in any given province, but will each province at least have a guaranteed share of the infrastructure budget?
There is no specific reference to public transit in the budget. However, you said that there were 140 projects ready to go. To come back to your role, can you tell us if there will be public transit projects for urban areas? This type of project is extremely important.