It was a budgetary decision at a time when the budget was extremely tight, but the program was not meeting any of its targets with regard to 50 million trees within a prescribed period of time. It had planted fewer than half of those trees at the time of the 2019 budget.
To put it into perspective, in 2018 we planted over 70 million trees as a province through our sector in one year. We plant an average of between 68 million to 71 million trees a year in the province of Ontario.
This program was not fulfilling its intended targets. Quite frankly, it wasn't doing it in the fiscal framework that we expected. That was a decision we made, and I'm quite comfortable having made it, because these were trees, many of them being planted on private property, and they were begging for people to take trees to try to make the program work, because it just wasn't administered properly. It wasn't meeting those targets. They were quite comfortable with that decision, because in our industry, we plant, as they say, an average of somewhere around 70 million trees a year.