Madam Chair, from the department's point of view—and I won't pass judgment on whether the quantum is sufficient—it's been a very large amount of money relative to the historical spend, in the zone of nine to 10 times more than the historical spend.
The other point I'd like to make to the honourable members is to point out that in many cases these are infrastructure projects that even in the best of circumstances take time. When you're laying fibre-optic cable over hundreds of kilometres of rough terrain and that sort of thing, particularly when you get into a rural and remote region, the challenge can increase significantly in terms of the actual deployment.
Obviously, we're as impatient as members are to get going, and we want to move the project as quickly as possible. There's no upside to going slow. We have to appear before committees like this and have people push us, but these are big projects and they can take a number of years in some cases. From the day you announce it to the day you get service, it can take some time, and that's just physics. It's just the amount of time it takes to build them.