Thank you very much for the question. The short answer is, who knows? I make my requests the same as everybody else, and then you fight for your share of the budget along with not only other departments but other needs within your own department. And you do list those things as priorities.
I totally agree with everything you said. In fact, going back to my very first day on this committee, I was appointed at caucus, I guess. The first meeting was in the afternoon, and the first day they were setting the agenda for the coming few months. I happened to suggest that one of the things we should look at--I highlighted three things, actually--was the coast guard. The other was overfishing, and the third was infrastructure.
In fact, the committee, through some travel, but through a lot of spadework by some of us, and even some good pictures, demonstrated the need to immediately move on infrastructure. That fall, in the budget of the former government, they brought in $20 million a year over five years, which expired last year. We made that funding permanent, because we couldn't do without it, and we added, I believe, an extra $11 million to that last year.
At the time, one of the witnesses was the person who looks after small craft harbours, Mr. Bergeron, and if you look at the minutes of that first meeting we had with departmental staff, he mentioned that it would take, I believe, $400 million at that time to bring our infrastructure up to standard, not to say make gains.
Certainly in terms of the work that has been done over the last few years, even though we've increased funding, I don't think we've made any major headway on that. Second, the price of everything has gone up substantially, particularly in recent years, which aggravates the problem.
There are a couple of things. Perhaps I should do your study. I'll try to sum up very quickly.
First, you mentioned divestiture. That is an issue that has not gotten the attention it deserves. In the departmental budget over the last number of years the amount for divestiture has been around $1.5 million. Really, in divesting, if we could just take the wharves and say to the communities or the fishing groups or the marina associations, “Here, take it, it's yours”, it would be great. I believe, David, we could get rid of over 300 wharves across the country that we're not using any more.
In some cases, towns or marina groups or whatever would love to have them. But the deal is, basically, that before we give them to anybody, we have to bring them up to standard, and it's not cheap. However, if we could find some way of offloading a lot of these, then instead of annual maintenance and insurance and whatever, we could put it into the wharves we need. With all this stuff we talk about in the fishery and what we have to do, if you haven't got a wharf to fish from, you're not going to fish. So I recognize the importance of it.