At home, we just call it “the accord”. It's just called the accord.
When I was Minister of Indigenous Services and, stepping outside of that role, in my role as regional minister for Newfoundland and Labrador, we were able to find an additional $2.5 billion, using the levers of the accord, for our provincial government and our province's economy. That's astounding, as I know you know, Ms. Jones. That's a lot of money for us. Because it was recurring funding over a number of years, it positively affected the credit rating of the province almost immediately and saved additional hundreds of millions of dollars.
What it did at that time—such a pivotal time in our history—was that it gave us control of our destiny. There is nothing we can do with the Atlantic Accord federally without it being mirrored provincially. Similarly, legislation provincially must be mirrored federally. We have to agree on these things. There's no getting around it. That sort of autonomy gave us such a sense of pride and a sense of prosperity at the time. Some people have called the Atlantic Accord our document of prosperity.
In my lifetime, it has created an industry that we are so proud of. We export our talent and our people all around the world. I sit on a plane, as many of you know, on flights from St. John's to Toronto, and the guy next to me is going to Mongolia at 29 years old because of the things he knows and the things he has learned. This is not something I thought we were capable of doing. Nobody thought we were capable of doing this 30 years ago. We are some of the best in the world at it.
You provide a form of stability and investment that provides training and benefits for a province. You allow them control. You attract investment.
We would have to reproduce something or would have to come up with some new government entity or body in order to embrace the billions of dollars and thousands of jobs that this has the capability of producing. Why would we do that? This works perfectly well. It has been proven and people believe in it. More importantly, the investment community believes in it. Actually, more important than that is that Newfoundlanders and Labradorians believe in it.