Thank you.
And thank you for being here. I'm very supportive of the bill, and I know you've done good work.
I have just a few questions about costs.
I do have a message, not for you but for the minister. I thought he'd be here for the whole hour.
I was kind of disgusted yesterday. He mentioned in the emergency debate that the fiscal position of the government was important in denying the thousands of aboriginal people who were crying for an extension of the healing foundation. That would have been $350 million. Yesterday, out of the blue, the government came out with $400 million for Haiti. It's great that they could come up with that, but if they could come up with that, it would be easy to get another $350 million.
My first question is on the costs of this bill. Because this plan has been in place for months, I assume you did some initial estimates. I know the minister said there are a bunch of what ifs and many varieties of things that could happen, but I assume someone did a rough estimate. All things being equal, if it applied to all of Canada--which court cases would probably end up doing--roughly, and if there were forty-five or however many thousands of people, and the simple parts of this bill were just added up...was there ever an estimate, a ballpark figure, of what the total costs might be?