Thank you very much.
This is interesting. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad that you as well as Mr. Cardinal and Mr. Thompson were invited.
This is an issue that has gotten some attention, both inside the House and outside the House. I've taken the opportunity to make a few calls and talk to some people about what this really means. I'm trying to get a handle on what's been going on. As much as I want to blame everything that happens—the weather, the fact that the tomatoes aren't big enough this year—on the government, I try to actually find out what's really going on.
I have a couple of questions. As we go through them, my colleagues on this side may also want to pipe in.
A couple of things come to mind. One is that my understanding is that by the time we got involved with the 2009 Buy American Act, it was 2010. At that point, according to the numbers I've seen, the consequences were that we had access to only 0.5% of the American infrastructure spending, which was $1.5 billion, whereas United States firms had access to $25 billion on our side. I raise that because I'm going to be looking to you to drill down a little on the point you made about the ongoing public transfers of $105 billion and what those actually represent to Canadian companies. That's one question regarding the last agreement.
The second part of that—and you've raised it—is that Canada was working at getting an ongoing exemption to prevent any further legislation like this from coming down the pipe. You said there were two meetings. I'm new at this; please appreciate that. Don't be too hard on me with your response. There have been two meetings. Given the severity and given how important this is and the impact, why haven't we been able to move more quickly on this in order to get that exemption under way?