Mr. Guimond, when I came here last year and I testified before this committee, I said I understood there had to be a deadline in the case of a recovery plan. It has to get started, there has to be a pretty speedy beginning. However, when it comes to finishing the work, I said last year that it would be impossible for the municipalities of Quebec to agree to this completely and to do what was being done elsewhere, because we got the authorizations, the program criteria, later.
Is it $100 million or $200 million? It doesn't matter. In my opinion, the municipal taxpayers of Canada should not be penalized because there were delays in a province that cannot, in general, be attributed to the municipality. We should therefore not have to pay more municipal taxes than other municipalities under a national economic recovery plan.
The answer is very simple: the government simply has to extend the deadline and allow the ones that initiated the process in good faith, who have completed all the main steps, to receive the assistance on the same basis as all the other citizens of Canada.