Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I see two parts to this question. The first was asking what was the genesis of the $53-million cut at CIC.
This was part of the strategic review process. Citizenship and Immigration Canada was under strategic review two years ago, in 2009. As a result, the budget of the department was reduced by about $67 million, or 4.3% of its current operating budget--so reallocated to other priorities. Its current budget is about $1.5 million.
So the bulk of those cuts, about $59 million, will come from settlement programming. There are other things around administrative savings, and there are things that affect the Metropolis project. But the bulk of them come from those savings.
The second part of your question, if I understood well, was on how this affects Ontario. I want to come back to two things that are at play. The first is the $53-million cut to settlement services, and that's applied nationally. The second part that affects Ontario is that under the previous agreement between Canada and Ontario, Ontario had a separate formula for funding that was outside the national formula we use for other provinces and territories outside of Quebec.
This year, with the end of the current agreement, we have seen this as an opportunity to more fairly allocate funds outside of Quebec. So we've used this opportunity to start to transition Ontario into a national funding formula, or bring Ontario into that formula. Those are the two things at play with Ontario this year.