It would be my pleasure to do that. I will start with the second question, if I may.
First of all, as you have mentioned, the last winter has been extremely harsh. If I compare it to the last few winters, there was virtually no ice in the lakes, so to speak. But this year, we've had record ice that dates back to the early 1990s. I think the last time we saw so much ice in the lakes was in 1994. The coast guard is taking extraordinary actions to allow for the safe movement of ships in the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway system.
The opening of the seaway was today, this morning actually. But we have sent larger ships than normal to allow for the breaking of the ice in the upper lakes. For instance, we have a ship that's en route to Sarnia, the Radisson. It's a ship that normally would never go west of Montreal. It's going to Sarnia and then it's going to continue to Lake Superior, which it should reach in a couple of days.
We have a second medium icebreaker, the Des Groseilliers that was in the locks earlier today in the Welland Canal. It was going to work on Lake Erie. We had up until a few days ago four feet of ice. So, yes, it's a lot of work, and we have had to use all of our icebreakers throughout the winter, since Christmas actually, extensively in the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the gulf, and all around Newfoundland far more than we did 20 to 30 years ago.
How is the VLE going to help? It's not helping with the icebreaking in the short term, but it will certainly help in the long term.
What is perceived as a decrease—actually it is a decrease—I would characterize it as cash management. For the vessel life extension, we have received from this government $360 million to spend over 10 years. When we asked for that money, we established a cashflow before we actually did an in-depth analysis of where we would need the money and also without considering the operational impact.
We spent the last year doing a planning project where we consulted our user. We consulted the operators of our fleet. We also consulted the various yards in the country to see their capacity of actually doing big work on ships. After that work, we reprofiled that money.
I have a table which shows the cashflow of the money over the 10 years, so we will finish the vessel life extensions for which we were given $360 million in the 10 years as planned, but rather than spending $30 million, we spent more time and energy planning for this, and the money is being moved to the following years.
Next year, for instance, we are starting major work on three vessels. Last year, we completed major work on the Amundsen. We changed the engines and generators. All of our icebreakers will go through significant work as will many other vessels over the next 10 years.