You've been a strong lobbyist for projects in Barrie. A few of your city councillors were in to present some projects that were shovel-ready about two weeks ago. I suspect your provincial colleague, Aileen Carroll, would be quite angry if you or I began to make announcements in Ottawa without them. They would think that was in bad faith and not constructive to federal-provincial relations.
George Smitherman has said to me that partnership is about working together, making decisions together, and making announcements together. It's not one side trying to get a communications or a PR advantage by scooping the other side. We are committed to working constructively.
I can tell you we announced 289 projects around the province. I think they went very smoothly in all but two of the cases. It was because you had people working and making announcements together, whether it's the federal and provincial governments and every region of the province working together.... We're not going to simply make unilateral announcements on the provinces. Those decisions are made collectively. That's what a partnership is all about. I suspect that if I started to make announcements unilaterally here, my Blackberry would start to go off and it would be the provincial minister calling to give me heck.
I made an announcement with Premier McGuinty on Friday. I didn't announce it before I got there. We announced it together. That's what the province asked for and that's what I asked for. They honoured and respected that, and I think that's good news. One of the biggest accountability mechanisms in all of this funding is that you have to work with the provinces and territories. We want to work with municipalities. We'll work constructively, in the case of your riding, with the McGuinty government. I have absolutely no doubt that we will be able to come to an agreement expeditiously on funds from the stimulus fund with them, but it involves cooperation and partnership. That's how it was always done and that's how we intend to proceed at this time.
I have had a good number of members of Parliament present projects in their constituencies, whether those be on the government or opposition side of the House. I'm constantly having members of Parliament put proposals on my desk that we take back to the department and review. I don't think the McGuinty government is going to cooperate with anything that's untoward or isn't of high ethical standards; neither do I think that the Doer government, the MacDonald government, or the Campbell government would. That's the biggest accountability mechanism. We're only a one-third partner in these projects. We need to work with provinces and municipalities, and that's what I would call a great check and balance on the process.
We are making record investments in infrastructure with big and small projects. We can be proud of that. It will move quickly, but we'll never move as quickly as people would like. We are committed, though, to make things happen for the beginning of this construction season.