In particular, the reasons that infrastructure money lapses and federal infrastructure transfer programs tend to lapse at a higher rate have been identified by your colleagues around the table.
First, with standard programs, the government will come to Parliament, and Parliament will provide them with the legal authority to spend. That will happen with infrastructure, but the next step out of the gate is to actually sit down and negotiate something with other levels of government, recognizing that the federal government isn't implementing on their own.
If there's a new piece of public transit infrastructure being built in Vancouver, the federal government isn't taking the money into its own budget, letting a contract, and going out the door. It actually needs to sit down with the Province of British Columbia and the City of Vancouver, make sure there's matching money brought to the table, and move forward on it. That certainly complicates things.
As well, by their nature, many infrastructure projects are more granular than other types of government spending, so you're looking at potentially larger projects, which take more time for the federal public service to perform due diligence in regard to. You'll have a situation where, internally, within the system, once the money is appropriated by Parliament, the federal public service needs to go out and negotiate the agreements. Then, in turn, in the case of infrastructure, the partners for infrastructure need to come back and sit down with the federal public service to work out the details around that.
I think the key takeaway coming out of our 2015 report—just to put a really blunt point on it—is that there's nothing untoward when the government lapses money. It's not as if there's any malevolent intent on the part of the government. It's simply that what was originally planned from a budgeting perspective has not come to pass. In this particular situation, for us, that ends up being important as part of our fiscal forecast. The timing around spending will affect the level of deficits over a set period of time, as well as the stimulus effects, and, last but not least, the actual overall impact.