Thank you very much.
You expressed almost an apology for the inability to provide more detailed analysis. And on the record, I will thank you and your entire office for the real efforts in providing that analysis and recognizing that it's really hard to do without the underlying information. So I just want to say thank you, at least for the effort.
Quite honestly, I'm a little bit concerned about letting the government off the hook by saying it needed more time. We have witnessed several countries engaging in the same exercise, recognizing that stimulus was needed and putting money out the door. The United States, for example, on its website www.recovery.org, has an extraordinary amount of information that is detailed.
With regard to projects the municipalities are involved in, for example, we had the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and two municipal representatives from Quebec at committee not too long ago talking about how so many of the projects that have been announced have not yet been started. And that, combined with the timeframe of 2011.... They've been very clear. It is still the policy that if a project is not finished by 2011, then the municipality will be on the hook for the costs. The number that was given was 3,000 projects that have been announced to great fanfare--the government is quite happy to take advantage of announcements. But announcements don't make jobs. And only a third have actually broken ground. We now have lost the construction season.
For the remaining two-thirds of the projects, from a budgetary perspective, if you were in a municipality.... I know it's awkward to put you in this position, but theoretically, if you were budgeting for a municipality and you now saw half of your window disappear because of the construction season being gone, would you not be thinking twice about whether to actually start some of those projects if you knew you were going to be on the hook if you couldn't get them done within only a year?