That's true, except that's known when you make the commitment. Nevertheless, with that knowledge in people's minds, they committed $2 billion to be spent for that year, and only a quarter of that was spent, and only 3% of the green infrastructure fund. So I still think that is a failure to get the money out the door the way the government committed to do it. If we look at the two years--last year and this year--together, and if we include all the authorities Infrastructure Canada has asked for, you still are only asking for $2 billion out of $4 billion over the two years. So in the budget, you claimed $4 billion over two years. What you're now asking for is half of that, $2 billion. For example, if you claim there are x jobs created, that's based on $4 billion. The most jobs you could have would be half of x if you only get out $2 billion. I just don't understand why you got out such a small fraction of the money that you promised you would.
I want to come now to the question of the announcement of the seven-month extension. We had been asking for six months, so I can hardly disagree with the substance of your announcement, but I do take exception to the timing, because we have been pushing for this for many months, and the consequences of delaying it as long as you did are important for municipalities in at least two respects.
First of all, many millions of extra dollars were spent on overtime trying to meet this arbitrary goal that everybody was shooting for. The former mayor of one town alone, Brantford, said his town alone spent millions of extra dollars in overtime because of this deadline, which was then extended.
The second thing is you talked earlier about rescoping projects in order to meet the deadline. I assume rescoping is a euphemism for downsizing, making them smaller. Now that the deadline has been extended, are you going back to those towns that rescoped or downsized their projects and telling them they can go ahead with the projects as they originally were, now that they have an extra seven months to get the job done?