Thank you, Madam Speaker. The purpose of the meeting was to meet with our provincial counterparts and the federal Transportation Minister, the Honourable Doug Young, with respect to trying to develop a national highway policy whereby the federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions would hopefully jointly fund a national highway system.

My understanding is this process has been in place since 1987, I believe. Certainly the Member from New Brunswick was very active at the meeting and indicated it's been a long drawn-out process.

The upshot of the meeting, basically, was that Mr. Young indicated there was no new money available at the federal level with respect to developing a national highway policy or a national highway system. However, he did indicate he was prepared to look at a reassignment of existing money that goes into the provincial and territorial jurisdictions, that perhaps -- he did stress "perhaps" -- those funds could be, along with the provinces and the territories, used to develop a strong national highway system.

We, along with our provincial counterparts, indicated to the Minister that we felt we could identify funds within our existing resources, and asked him if he would be prepared to match them. The conclusion at the end of the day was that we would provide him by the end of, I believe it was, this month, the kind of levels of funding we felt we could identify within our existing budgets as subject to the approval of our Premier and Finance Ministers. He committed to trying to identify similar funds from his federal funding before the end of the calendar year, the end of December. Thank you.