Thank you to our witnesses for their contributions here today to our ongoing look at infrastructure in Canada.
Looking at needs and investments, a chart is available in our budget. It looks at federal spending on provincial, territorial, and municipal infrastructure. I'm sure you don't have it in front of you, but as I'm holding it up here, it charts from 1990 out to about 2022-23, showing a significant drop in funding between 1995 and 2005, and then an onward trend. It even shows the stimulus period where there was an additional injection of federal funding. It shows, I think accurately in the graph, the federal divestiture of ports infrastructure, for example, in the 1990s, the offloading of the national airports system, privatization of rail. There were a number of policies at the time whereby there was significant offloading by the federal government, perhaps to help balance federal budgets in the 1990s. It's not exactly what we could term a “partnership”, I think, as both of our witnesses today and the FCM earlier were talking about.
I think you made reference, Mr. Vrbanovic, that federal investments are signalling the beginning of a broader partnership with the federal government. I think, Dr. Ballem, you referred to it as a renewed partnership. I think we can all agree that it's an important and necessary partnership for us to have.
One of the foundational ways we've embarked on this...Mr. Vrbanovic, you referred to the gas tax fund, which is now permanent and indexed and gives some real clarity in baseline funding. Mr. Vrbanovic, Kitchener's allocation is how much in gas tax funding a year, about $6 million-plus? Is that correct?