I will start with your last question, because it is the hardest one to answer.
I told you that we at Health Canada were very proud of what we had accomplished over the last four or five years. I can't tell you what kind of recommendation we will make. We will be providing options when asked to do so. It will be up to government to decide. It is difficult for us to tell you what we are going to recommend to the minister.
Communities wanted to know, before the beginning of the five-year plan, what officials would recommend to the minister. We said that we really could not tell them what our recommendation would be, but that we had heard their request for some $500 million over five years. We told them that we could not tell them what would result from it. Actually, we came up with significant amounts, but they were lower than the communities had hoped for.
As far as I am concerned, the creation of a new model of governance was arduous work. I have done many things over the course of my career within the federal government, and I can assure you that it is one of the three, four or five most challenging initiatives I have ever been involved in. The public service has a culture which is based on cautiousness and, at the end of the day, the status quo. It does not like change. The fact that we were going to be shaking things up, that we would no longer be managing projects, but that they would be managed by the communities themselves so that they could take ownership of them and make their own choices, all of that made people uncomfortable. Some people feared perhaps that by losing that control, they would no longer know what to do nor whether the money was well spent. We experienced a shift in culture because we needed to create a climate of trust.
In general, the public does not appreciate public servants. I am sure some community representatives support the people helping decision-makers make decisions, but at the end of the day, there is a bias against public servants. When they find themselves caught up in the bureaucracy, which exists for good reason because it is after all tax payers money that is being spent, things grind to a halt due to the culture and the checks and balances which must be applied to ensure money is well spent. That reinforces the bias people may have against the bureaucracy.
After two years, a number of bumps in the road and lively meetings with francophone communities, they know now that we are acting in good faith, that we are trying to break down barriers, but that we must exercise some control. We have struck the right balance and the communities trust us. That is my view of the situation. We should ask Hubert Gauthier and Andrée Lortie what they think. I think that we have reached some common ground.
I don't know if I am addressing your second question. I am impressed by what the communities have done. Some may say it was Health Canada's doing but that would not be true. The federal government provided the money, and the communities decided on how to spend it. Incredible things are being done. For one thing, five or six provinces now listen to these communities and get along very well with them.
There are some examples I can give you. Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes is a health services centre which will soon be built. The federal government's investment was $30,000. The total value of the project is $3 million. With just $30,000 in seed money, the communities managed to get funding from the provinces and their own communities in order to build a $3 million centre. That is exactly what happened with the training centre in New Brunswick which I discussed earlier. A small amount was invested in training and all of a sudden, the university and the province decided to work together to build something.