Thank you very much.
First of all, we did have a look at these, and I just want to stress that in fact we didn't lose a year. That is not accurately being portrayed. We reviewed the programs, absolutely. We looked at the ones we thought were not working.
I'll give you some examples. There were commercial buildings--the CBIP program. When we had a hard look at that, we actually found out that we were cutting cheques to large corporations like Zellers and Sears and some of the large banks. They were receiving money from these programs to retrofit their businesses to make them more energy efficient, when they have a very healthy bottom line. Although we still encourage these businesses to do that type of work, we didn't believe, number one, that taxpayers should be funding this.
Just let me finish and I'll get on to your question.
So the programs, with respect to losing the year, in fact wound down, and in fact there was even some overlap when we brought in our new programs. One of the things we discovered, actually, when we announced that we were winding down the previous EnerGuide program--in fact it didn't end until end of March this year--was that there was greater take-up of it. There was a bit of a race for the finish line, if I may use that, because they knew that this program was ending, and of course we didn't announce right away what its replacement would be. There was an increased uptake in the program, and we saw that. In fact, the program continued on, and it even had much greater use.
As far as what we announced, the $299 million for the ecoENERGY efficiency initiative is targeted at reducing greenhouse gases. In fact, the people in our department, the scientists, will tell us that in fact we will actually, with our program, obtain far greater efficiencies in actually saving energy, and hence actually reduce a greater amount of greenhouse gas.
So at the end of the day, we recognize how important energy efficiency is, and we wanted to design efficient--