In the old days, we would try to work with our colleagues in the provinces and territories to get the money spent from those programs, but as we saw over the last few years, we had a bit of a backlog of money. In fact, we had $837 million from what we call our “legacy programs”, which had not been allocated. The government said that if we couldn't get that money committed by a certain date, it would indeed be transferred into the gas tax program.
On March 23rd, 2017. See this statement in context.