I was worried there for a moment. You sort of indicated that you had a good number of examples.
The fundamental premise behind this—and it's not complicated—with this stimulus money, which is $4 billion extra, $12 billion across government of new money to provide economic stimulus....
Just down the street from Parliament Hill, Bank Street is being repaired. It was going to be repaired before the economic statement this year. What we didn't want to do is simply have the municipality pull money out and put federal and provincial money in. We wanted this to be something above and beyond what you'd normally do. And I have to say, generally speaking, that's been fairly well responded to.
With respect to Building Canada, you perhaps went further than I would have. I said there were some really legitimate concerns about Building Canada. I didn't say it wasn't working.
I'll give you an example from just about five or ten kilometres from your own constituency. Two years ago we announced funding for the Spadina subway extension, and no money has flowed. The reason is that they just started construction a few weeks ago, and they hadn't invoiced us yet. You don't build a $2 billion subway expansion overnight. It takes a huge amount of planning and contracting and engineering work.
So Building Canada is for the larger projects, the ones that simply.... You can't build a subway or a major public transit thing in two years. The stimulus funding, by and large, will be for smaller projects, where they can move more quickly, where things are more short term.
I think it is important that we respond and that there are good investments and benefits beyond the jobs created in the short term, and beyond the infrastructure, whether they're environmental or they're reducing congestion, or whether it's supporting the economy and economic growth.
But I think what we are doing is accelerating Building Canada. In large measure, some of that is political bickering. If we can use these economic hard times and the good relationships that are developing unexpectedly at the federal-provincial relations table, let's strike while the iron is hot and get a lot of approvals in place, even though they'll go well beyond 2011. Building Canada goes until 2014, but I'm saying let's get these projects approved now for 2012, because you can't just flick a switch and start a billion-dollar project. We're striking while the iron is hot to try to make things happen.