With respect to the delays or the gap between what is announced in a federal budgeting document versus what actually occurs when you look at the public accounts at the federal level around infrastructure spending, it is absolutely not new. This is something that, I think, in our first committee appearance or shortly after budget 2016, we flagged as a risk associated with the delays for the reasons that you enumerate.
Again, 90% of the money that's spent on public infrastructure across the country is spent directly by provinces and municipalities. Those organizations tend to have a plan between three and five years going out. In some situations, it can go out over a longer period of time, so their ability to turn things around very quickly and accommodate a significant material boost in federal infrastructure spending, federal infrastructure transfers, is somewhat limited, especially in comparison to 2009, when there ended up being a significant gap in the economy. There was a lot of slack, firms were going bankrupt very quickly, and people were losing their jobs very quickly.
In the current context, we don't have the same slack in the economy, so as one sizable municipality pointed out to me, it's not as if they can let a contract and there'll be 10 firms bidding on it immediately to go out and do the work, and they're able to spend the money very quickly in a competitive way. They can let a contract, and they know that the bids coming in will more than likely account for additional overtime, so the firms can certainly take on the work, but it's not part of their regular order book. They would have to take on, pay extra, and have the work done within set periods of time.