Thank you very much, Chair.
Minister, welcome. I'm pleased to see you here in the Christmas spirit.
While we accept and agree that there is $33 billion on the table, my premise would be that a great deal of the money that you claim is new money is in fact regifted money that was allocated, announced, committed to by the 2005 budget of the Paul Martin government.
Having said that, I was wondering, sir, whether or not you and I could spend a few of the minutes allocated to me to go through your budget numbers. Of the $8.8 billion in the Building Canada fund proper, $7.5 billion of it was in fact generated by cutting the funds that were announced in the 2005 Liberal budget. In total, according to the math that I have, there is only $3.6 billion over seven years that could be considered new money: $2.3 billion comes through equal jurisdictional funding; $1.3 billion comes to top up the Building Canada fund. Spread over seven years, this means a little more than $500 million annually that can be considered new money.
So not all of that money, according to the way I've listened to your opening statements and evaluated your budgets, will go directly to cities. How can you justify calling the $33 billion plan a plan? Isn't it just regifting, sir?