Essentially, I think the primary reason that the federal government has historically avoided operation costs is twofold.
First, it introduces a level of discipline into the system. If you are going to be responsible, after the project is built, for the operation and maintenance of that project, then you are going to build a system that's commensurate with the size of your needs. If you really only need seven buses, you're not going to apply for 25 buses, because then you're going to be responsible for paying the gas, the upkeep, the maintenance, the drivers, the salaries, etc., for the operation of that system. So number one is that it introduces a level of discipline.
Number two is that with capital costs it's very easy to be able to show what's incremental and what is something that you were going to do anyway. With operating costs and salaries it's much less clear. So we have municipalities that come to us and say, for instance, we want to build this project but we're going to only use our own engineers; we're not going to use outside contractors. For us, then, it becomes a case of, well, how are we going to really figure out what you were going to pay for anyway?
So we don't want to be in a situation where we're just substituting federal tax dollars for other tax dollars. In previous programs that the government has run, that's been criticized by the Auditor General. Our capacity to show that the federal dollars are really incremental is much easier on the capital side than it is on the operating side.