Exactly. It was a specific carve-out.
Obviously, with the duties being put in place against Canada, we knew the immediate impacts were going to be on the large steel producers in particular and aluminum companies as well. The price of aluminum has gone up considerably, but it's a continental price so the effect has not been as significant on the large primary producers, but on steel companies the effect has been in the millions of dollars per day.
The first issue we were aware of that was going to happen was that many of them would be put in a situation where they would be either cancelling or pushing forward their investment plans, and that's a recipe to have firms become less competitive over time. The SIF program, the new allocation of $250 million, was put in place to support investment plans and investments in capital infrastructure by those large producers, recognizing they were going to be the most impacted.
We set a couple of parameters: that the companies had to have at least 200 employees and that they had to have capital investment plans of at least $10 million. That was done—to the point that was raised earlier—to enable us to act more quickly with the largest companies that were going to be the most affected.
We know from past practice that, in the absence of some parameters for programs, what happens is that you can get inundated by requests from everybody. We looked very carefully at who was going to be in the field of the most impacted and made sure we were scoping them in, in an effort to ensure we were not effectively paralyzed by an endless number of requests. I think our own analysis, as the deputy alluded to earlier, is that there are about 7,000 or 8,000 other companies that are downstream users of steel and aluminum that have been impacted in one way or another.
The $2 billion that you identified.... That was why there were allocations within BDC and EDC to ensure they were in a position to respond. Some of the data I have is that BDC so far has more than 267 clients that have been impacted for over $100 million, and EDC has done roughly $60 million for 25 clients. Those numbers are up to the end of October.
That was the intention, to have the smaller and medium-sized companies go there, in addition to being able to do things like use the duty drawback initiative, and then also apply for remissions where either they were contractually obligated to continue to purchase, so they had no ability to change suppliers, or there was no steel supply that was Canadian in source. So in instances where you couldn't move within the Canadian marketplace, we have identified a remissions process through the Department of Finance, and they have already begun to provide relief to companies through that.
They deal with all of the elements working together. It would provide a comprehensive response, in addition to, obviously, the retaliation package, where the government responded dollar for dollar to what had been done out of the United States.
The point, too, is that one of those programs is retroactive.