I think it's getting closer to five years of my life and the lives of some others that we've invested in this agreement, and it did include many ups and downs.
The first few years were really about laying the building blocks. We certainly ran into some challenges through that first period, but I had a clear understanding with my counterpart that when we ran into a roadblock, we would look to solve it by moving the level of ambition up rather than lowering it to find a common ground. We consistently stuck to that, which is why we have the level of ambition in the agreement we have now.
Over the last year or year and a half, we essentially got through all of the issues except for the most difficult ones. We came close to being able to have a crunch point in the negotiations once in November of last year and again in February of this year, and we came very close at the end of July of this year. Things didn't quite hold together at that point, but we were very close. We had to pick up some of the pieces again in September. Then we had a core set of issues where the gaps were quite narrow but the issues were still quite difficult.
This has been a big effort that's taken numbers of people from provinces and territories. Our first delegations to Brussels were 120 people, including provinces and territories. Now we're down to negotiations that involve a handful of people. Basically we've been working seven days a week and in many cases twenty-hour days for a very long time. The remaining issues always are the most sensitive, the most difficult, and those require a particularly sustained effort to get through.