Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank the witnesses for coming today.
Canada's economic action plan was huge for my riding. I had the opportunity to talk to all the mayors and the reeves throughout our riding. Medicine Hat is a fairly large riding in the southeast corner of Alberta and is about the same size as the island of Taiwan. I can tell you that throughout the whole riding we saw numerous projects, whether it was roads or work on bridges, infrastructure, the RInC program, community adjustment funding, or knowledge infrastructure, there was money there.
What I saw was the huge acceptance by the municipalities, as well as our other partner, the province, to fund these projects. As a result of that, we have numerous projects that were approved and are well under way. In fact, I have been able to attend a number of the projects that have been completed.
I have never seen so many happy mayors and reeves throughout our riding. The individuals and community members were totally supportive of all of these projects. We had small RInC programs in very small communities. People were just delighted to get their baseball diamond fixed up and repaired and to get new diamonds. From that standpoint, it was absolutely great.
I understand that there may be one project within our group, by the City of Medicine Hat, on water treatment, and they're saying that it may be delayed slightly. It could still come in on time, but part of that was because of the massive floods throughout southeast Alberta this last June. From that standpoint, there was a bit of an impact.
I didn't go around and count the number of people who were working, but I talked to people on most of projects and they told me that they were hiring local contractors. A number of organizations were hiring local people to get these jobs done, and the communities said these projects needed to be done. From that standpoint, I was absolutely delighted that in fact the program has been so successful.
One of the things we did talk about was the accountability. One of the questions I would have for the Transport Canada folks is, in terms of the accountability and the speed, how do you balance being able to get that done?
I have to appreciate all the civil servants who worked on these projects, all the hours and everything. I think they did an absolutely fabulous job.