Perhaps I'll start, but I'm sure that Jeff has recollections as well, and he can sort of support any comments that I might miss.
We brought this matter to the attention of several members of Parliament last November, in what we call the CAAR annual parliamentary forum. Unfortunately, it wasn't just one issue that we brought to their attention; we had several, so this may have been diluted. Since then, it was believed that the best approach was to single down to this issue, as the most important for our industry and stress it to government.
At that time, we approached and met with Mr. Chuck Strahl, the Minister of Agriculture. We've met with several staff in that department. We've met with all the parliamentary secretaries, pretty well from agriculture to public safety. We met with Mr. MacKenzie, as well as Transport Canada.
The issue for us is that we span five ministries, and it can be very difficult for us to pinpoint which department might own this issue, as the products that our retailers carry actually come under several acts and several different departments.
We presented to the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food. That's the only other committee we presented to. Suffice to say that we've probably visited every key official who has influence with regard to our products.
Until now, we feel that we're being listened to, but we don't feel that we've gotten the necessary traction on any program that we recommended.
At the last meeting with Minister Strahl's staff, they asked us to present some specific numbers, some of which we've included for you today. They also asked for a specific estimate of cost per site and what the total contribution program might look like. The numbers were rather staggering. For us they were too, because we had previous estimates that were much lower, when we finally did our own cost analysis. In particular, we were absolutely blown away by the cost of lighting for these sites, and also for fencing and of course the surveillance cameras.
Once we came up with the numbers and multiplied them by the number of sites in Canada, we were in the multiple millions of dollars. There was some degree of sticker shock at the minister's office about that. At this point, the ball is kind of in their court, but they've also asked us to validate those numbers.
So over the course of the summer we are going back to our members to literally assess, based on a survey, where they are in terms of the current status of security upgrade, what degree is left to do, and what the cost might actually be. Early indications are that our initial estimates were quite accurate. We presented a number of approximately $120 million to complete all site upgrades across Canada.
If there was a 75-25 cost-share basis, the government would be asked for close to $90 million. I'm not surprised that it came with some degree of sticker shock. So we're going to make sure that we absolutely validate those numbers and that we are able to present them to the government in the fall.