The first thing I would say about that, and I'll give a little example to highlight it, is that the signals going forward in terms of the investment in public transit are critical. They're great, but what needs to be refined out of that? As an example, the real pressure coming from our industry partners and our transit partners is that investment from the federal government needs to be partnered with municipal investment.

That's not so much a dollar figure. That's a philosophical issue around how the federation will work with our cities going forward to transfer that money to them, to the transit agencies. The big issue that has come up is that, if any of that funding flows through provinces, it's going to become highly problematic, become a bottleneck, not get deployed and certainly not achieve 5,000 zero-emission buses by 2024-25.

One issue there is the philosophical issue and the constitutional issue of how to work with the cities and transit agencies directly to deploy that money. If that can be achieved, then we know in agencies across this country from TransLink to London to Quebec City, there are about two dozen cities that are ready to roll.

The second point of recommendation is that, if there is a way to get the funding to the cities and transit agencies quickly, it won't be all cities and transit agencies that are ready to absorb it on day one. If we try to do the Canadian thing of spreading the peanut butter thin and handing out some money to all cities with transit, it's not going to be effective in achieving our transition goals or the 5,000 bus goal. Instead, what has to happen is a focus on those 20 to 25 cities and transit agencies that meet three KPIs.

First, their municipality has passed a climate action emergency or a ZEB target, which means city councillors and mayors are not going to be the obstacle. They're already philosophically and politically aligned.

Second, the agency has already deployed, on its own dime or in partnership with the province or federation, a pilot or first procurement of buses. Trying to send millions of dollars and tens of millions to a city that has zero buses right now is not going to be the fastest way to deploy the money effectively. There are a couple of dozen agencies in Canada that, on their own dime over the last four years, when it wasn't popular to do so and was very complex and difficult, actually deployed buses already. That's TransLink, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, etc., and Laval and Grande Prairie, so some of the smaller cities too.

The third KPI is that the agency has to have a feasibility study done. In previous funding from PTIF to ICIP and other kinds of federal funds, there was no requirement that the city or transit agency show up saying, we did the physics and the mathematics, we know what kinds of buses, charger systems or hydrogen fuelling we need. Instead, money was deployed and often with a high-pressure timeline. The result of that was that we did get procurements, but they weren't the best procurements for those communities.

Nobody wants wasted tax dollars, so the third KPI is to target the initial tranche of funding in the next 24 months to those cities that have done the feasibility studies, the transit agencies and cities that have a climate action commitment at the council or regional level and that have already deployed at least a pilot or initial procurement. The second tranche of agencies that follow soon after are the ones that haven't deployed a pilot or initial procurement but have the feasibility work done and the climate action commitment.

If you use those three simple KPIs, we will get to 5,000 ZEBs. We will transform the industry. We will retain investment by New Flyer, Nova Bus, ABB, Siemens, Ballard, Hydrogenics and the other players in this industry that, right now, are being pulled to California and are being pulled to Europe because of major procurements there.

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