I'll add something, if I may. I'd say pretty much the same thing that my colleague had to say. I refer to some numbers here. Those are the ones that the proponents tell us, but they don't tell us how many people were employed at the lumber store to sell them the lumber or the other materials to do these things.
There is another very interesting thing we can't count here. A number of the communities that we have supported, as you can imagine, are small communities in rural areas. In a bunch of cases you can tell--by the power savings reductions that they're looking at and by the upgrades they're doing--that for a small municipality, it's got to be a choice between keeping the system or facility going and not keeping it going for some years into the future. Having visited a number of these places, I'm quite convinced that without some of these upgrades, in some cases they would have had to close down. How you calculate the employment per facility that doesn't shut down is one of things we just can't do at this point in time, but there are models for trying to figure those things out.
In the short term, obviously the goal was to get people directly employed in replacing cooling and heating systems and stuff like that, and in the longer term to figure out the right modelling for exactly the number of jobs that will be created, indirectly and directly, as my colleague pointed out.
I will briefly go back to the question of the March 31 deadline. Obviously I can't speak as the minister could to the public policy choice there, but what I will say is that proponents have worked extraordinarily hard to make sure they will be done by March 31. They've taken us at our word that the date will be March 31. We've written it into agreements; they seem to honour those agreements and they expect us to as well.
One of the things we have heard an awful lot is that as people have done extra work and rearranged things, re-scoped things, and so on, they've said very directly to us, “We're going to a lot of effort here to make sure this happens; we want to make sure that you're being straight with us that the date is March 31.” As we've talked to them about that, they've relied on that information. I think the results are pretty clear in the fact that we expect 94% to 96% of the money to be spent with the current deadline.