But that's only for the last three years. My understanding is, and I've been informed, that six months has been the average for many years, which is why the 25% was set out--and I see some nodding heads--to address some of that concern. It sounds as though this has been ongoing for ten or more years, and it's unfortunate that we haven't found a way of progressing more quickly. I do want to point out some of the challenges that I've learned about since I've been here.
Of course we don't have public servants who have delegation for approval. The funding for the projects has to go to the minister. So they go to the regions where they do what's called “due diligence”, and then of course they go through a number of other steps before the public servants then transfer them to the minister who has to approve them.
This has been a unique year. We had an election in October. Boy, oh boy, I'm still not fully aware of all of my responsibilities, and I'm seven months in. So it was unique simply because of the way we started, but also it's unique because of this need for Treasury Board to deal with the files that were coming to an end.
You talked about multi-year agreements. It's true that we have multi-year agreements. Isn't it?