There are a couple of things. Let me start with the rural and northern communities. For those communities, I think they're really happy to see some dedicated funding and I would say, like cities, they'd always take more, not less. Roads are their transit systems and there's a lot of mileage. Someone told me the other day there are enough roads in Ontario, road kilometres, to go around the earth eight times. It's a pretty important infrastructure for a lot of our members, so having that dedication is great. Some of the other flexibilities in phase two with the change in the percentages will probably help them.
In terms of the lapsing, I'm not too sure I can give you a lot of information on that. I do not spend every day, every moment, looking at the federal website. I think what would benefit everyone immensely is probably some information around performance. Because we administer the federal gas tax, we have certain requirements of us. We do it freely because we want to support our members.
I also think the difference is in the nature of the program design. The federal program for gas tax that we administer is done on an allocation basis. They know what they will receive every year, and when they will receive it. It allows them to better plan projects. In phase one, they did step up. The fact that we had close to 2,000 projects submitted in six weeks says that they were willing to step up to the plate to try to find their own percentage of the contribution to that, but it wasn't without risk. The administration of the federal gas tax is much more predictable and sustainable, and it is easier to manage your business case. If you ask municipal governments which model they would prefer, I'm pretty sure they'd say the gas tax model.
For phase one in Ontario, we managed to work with the province to get some of those features involved, so they knew, as I said, what they were going to get under phase one. Then they could go figure out what project could, from their readiness perspective...and try to find some money themselves. This did help. It wasn't the easiest but it was better than what I would call the old grant process where you apply and hope for the best.