Mr. Speaker, that is a fair question from a very thoughtful and respected colleague. I would point out that in 2005, when the funding levels were established in the Canada-Ontario immigration accord, the number was picked arbitrarily. It was not based on any kind of evidence-based assessment of what the actual needs for settlement services were in Ontario. Rather, it was based simply on the peg mark of what Quebec received, itself based on a mathematical formula established in 1991. It was really an arbitrary figure.
Having said that, we respected the levels that were foreseen in the COIA accord in 2005 and increased the settlement funding in Ontario from $111.5 million to roughly $365 million. However, we found that there was not an adequate number of services to fund. We did these requests for proposals from the non-governmental organizations that provide the services and we simply did not get enough eligible proposals.
Unlike, perhaps, other governments, we were not going to just blow the money. We were not going to write cheques to organizations ineligible to receive them. Since then, in 2007, in consultation with Ontario and the other provinces, we did come up with a new settlement funding allocation formula based on the number of immigrants, the number of refugees--