It's a little bit before your time, but I'm happy to explain a very strange turn of events, the strangest I have seen in my time as a politician, which is that particular announcement by the then federal government prior to a federal election was the first time I've ever had a government phone me and ask, “How much money do you need?” My answer was, “Well, we only have a class five estimate. We've only just started on this work, because we were not anticipating accelerating this.” The question I got was, “How much to you need?”
We gave our best class five estimate, which is, obviously a very, very early estimate. Then, working with the new governments provincially and federally, as well as with the communities and with engineering, we talked about what needed to make sense for the community. It was decided that we needed to do this right the first time. That means that we had to tunnel under the Bow River, which added an enormous amount of cost to the project because a new bridge was found not to be feasible and a street-level LRT running through downtown Calgary was found to increase congestion to unacceptable levels for car traffic. As a result, after multiple years of major consultation, that class five estimate has now been revised to an estimate with which we're very comfortable. That allows us to build the hardest part of this project first.
We had someone suggest as recently as yesterday that we ought to not build the hard part and that we ought to not bring the line downtown, which doesn't make any sense at all because then you would be connecting to an existing line at its most congested point where you can't get on the train during rush hour. I'm very, very comfortable with the decision that the city council took in deep consultation with the community that we want to build the hard part first.
Now there are 10 years of construction here, and we're waiting on timing from the Government of Canada on the funding from the public transportation infrastructure plan; however, we anticipate that the funding will match the funding of the province, which is an eight-year term. That means that years nine, 10, 11, 12, and 13 will give us the opportunity to really be able to move forward with continuing the construction on the easier parts. As we get $100 million at a time, we'll build a station at a time. The city is committed to continue to do that, and we'll get closer to your riding as well in so doing.