One of the things I wanted to impress on the committee was the whole sense of partnership that's been building over the last five years in Ontario, not only between the federal government and the provincial government, but also the funding stakeholders like the City of Toronto, which has a memorandum of understanding as part of COIA, as well as our community foundations like the United Way of Greater Toronto. All these agencies and the private foundations have often come together to leverage CIC funding so that agencies are able to provide a holistic program within a case management framework.
The fact that $43 million has been taken out of the system just undermines the whole partnership that has been developed. It forces the funders to take a look at what they can do if the integrity of the infrastructure of some of our agencies has been compromised. That is also something we are urging CIC to pay attention to and to engage those other funders as it thinks through how best to deal with this new financial reality we have in Ontario.
I think it's very important that we pay attention to what further cuts within the next fiscal year will mean to Ontario. We think a delay of the settlement allocation model is doable. The same way Quebec has had its very special agreement, which we don't begrudge, we wish Ontario could have a similar agreement. We absolutely understand the need for a settlement allocation model. We do believe that money should follow immigrants. But we also know we cannot evaluate programs and we cannot look at outcomes only by numbers. We also have to look at quality and effectiveness of services. Those are also positive outcomes.