In my job at FCM I spend a lot of time on the phone with our members, who are usually phoning us and asking how we can help them solve their problems related to the infrastructure stimulus fund and to ensure that their projects get done. In the vast majority of cases, municipalities don't actually do a lot of planning and engineering work until they know the project is budgeted. In the case of the infrastructure stimulus fund, they would have chosen projects that may not have had the designs fully complete, but for which they knew they could complete the designs relatively quickly.
To your question of whether the people who were more or less on schedule happened to have projects that were fully drafted, I know for a fact that was not true, because lots of municipalities phoned and said they have begun drafting plans and doing engineering and all the rest, after finding out they had got the money. That's normal. There is a whole variety of reasons why people are on target. Anyone who has renovated their home will know that if you tear down a wall and find something you didn't expect, it puts you back six weeks, eight weeks, two months, or a year. The same thing happens when you dig up a road or pull down a building. So there is a variety of reasons to explain why people are on target or not on target.