Transport committee  No, that's not just for staff. This amount will be used in various other ways.

Transport committee  That is an excellent question. It's not necessarily the case that they will all be permanent, indeterminate hires. We are in fact doing work with some of the organizations you mentioned. We look outside and we do contracting with other stakeholders to provide exactly that kind of expertise.

Transport committee  That's an excellent question that you've raised. It hasn't come up extensively yet in the discussions that we've been having with the provinces and territories, because we don't have final lists of projects yet. I think that will help us understand better what the scale of that challenge might be, and it will be something that we will then need to sit down and see if there is some kind of staging that we can do in conjunction with the provinces.

Transport committee  Thank you for your question. Two initiatives are identified in Budget 2016. Both are related to natural disasters. For the Lake St. Martin canal, in Winnipeg, we have allocated $12 million. The other is the Lions Gate waste water system in British Columbia, for which $11.7 million has been allocated.

Transport committee  This is what is in our agreements that we're hoping to negotiate with the provinces. The federal commitment is for 50%. If the question is, is there some kind of a formula as to what the provinces and the municipalities are going to contribute, our minister has certainly expressed himself very forcefully that he hopes the provinces will contribute their typical one-third share in recognition of the difficulties that municipalities often face in matching.

Transport committee  We do have a draft, but typically, because these are negotiations with provinces and territories, those agreements will be made public afterward.

Transport committee  I'm sorry, benchmarks?

Transport committee  No, we try and ensure some kind of standardization—

Transport committee  I think that is protected by negotiation of confidence at this point.

Transport committee  The blank one is what we're negotiating. We have a draft template. I don't believe we are at liberty at this time to share them, but I can certainly double-check and get back to you.

Transport committee  Our agreements are typically written in a way that it's always “up to”, but the intent here is that the federal commitment is 50%—

Transport committee  Fifty per cent.

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  I'd say it's a little bit faster. We got a lot of feedback from provinces and territories on some of our earlier programs that it took a long time before we could actually get to an agreement on a particular project. That had a lot to do with some of our internal processes, so what we have tried to do is lighten up on the internal processes.

Transport committee  I'll start with that one first. I would say there's no guarantee in terms of phase two funding, because in phase two, the parameters of the program haven't been designed yet.