Thank you. I must say, Chair, that it's to my great benefit that we have a police officer as parliamentary secretary to Finance. It brings a certain focus and discipline to the work of the finance department.
I enjoyed the meeting with the fire chiefs. They gave me a really cool hat, which I did not wear last night, but it would have been appropriate for Halloween.
We have a lot of volunteer firefighters across the country. The number is really quite remarkable. They tell me there are about 85,000 volunteer firefighters who keep our communities safe across the country. I heard from many members of Parliament, and some are around this table, including members of the opposition parties when we were preparing the budget last year, encouraging the government, through Finance, to bring forward in the budget a tax credit for volunteer firefighters. There has been some pressure on many communities trying to recruit volunteer firefighters. One of the realities now is that a lot of people who would be volunteer firefighters work in larger centres and travel there to work and aren't available during the day to respond to emergencies.
So we hope and expect that this tax credit will help volunteer firefighters by providing them with a 15% non-refundable tax credit on an amount of $3,000, which was the recommendation made to us by the volunteer firefighters associations, and we accepted their proposal.