Thank you, Mr. Watson, for your question.
Maybe I can give a quick response to Mr. Masse on the last part. I wasn't able to answer that, because I didn't have a chance, but I would just point out that the market is going to determine whether or not there is a viability here; and that's the process I'm trying to explain to him. If the market says no, we reject it, it's going to be rejected, but we have strong indications that the market will be interested in this kind of an approach. It is a creative approach.
When you look at Building Canada, it's $33 billion. When you add on what we believe to be a proper estimation, that's $33 billion, plus the provinces announced some money, plus the municipalities did, plus we'll also be unlocking P3s. So that total is estimated to be somewhere in the vicinity of $60 billion, which comes back to our objective of being able to meet that infrastructure deficit.
When we came into power, the Minister of Finance said we needed to have world-class infrastructure in Canada to be able to be competitive. He asked me to go out with my officials to seek the comments and observations and recommendations of everybody. We met with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. We met with the executive of the large cities. We met with the executive of the rural caucus for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
I met with numerous ministers of transport, from every province. My officials met with folks from every province who deal with infrastructure. I have personally met with several ministers, and we came back and started and developed the design of our program, which we then resubmitted for the purpose of making sure that we were going in the right direction.
We had informal discussions with, once again, the same people we had met, and we were able then to go through the process in cabinet and have this Building Canada plan adopted. So the year that was spent, within 2006 and 2007, was a year in which we went out and sought commentaries, information, and recommendations from all of the observers who were interested in it. We also had a round table, I recall, of interested parties in infrastructure, whether they be engineers, city managers, or urban transit officials. So yes, we had a large consultation process.