Just to give you some perspective, after what was supposed to have been a federal-provincial-territorial ministers meeting a couple of months ago in Toronto, which ended up being a provincial-territorial meeting instead, FCM put out a communiqué in support of what we were doing in our call for the federal government and the provincial governments to work together to create a sport and recreation infrastructure fund.
Development charges in the province of Ontario are levied by the municipality. They go into the general consolidated revenue, and they are actually available for sport and recreation infrastructure. In new developments in particular, recreation centres and so on are built with that money and other moneys.
What we're calling for, and the provincial ministers have been very insistent on this, in ensuring that we let people know this is our number one priority.... There was such a backlog of existing facilities, which tend to be in older neighbourhoods and not in growth areas where development is taking place. Thus you don't have those development charges.
To put this in some perspective, I mentioned the statistics earlier: 80% of Ontario's single-pad arenas are over 25 years of age, and 13% are over 50 years of age. Arenas and pools, because of the equipment and the plant that goes with them, are very expensive to build and operate.
That is one of the reasons you see very few private sector arenas. The private sector cannot make money on arenas, so you have to have either a partnership or the government involved in the construction of these facilities.