That is a very complex question. Indeed, and I don't need to say this here, for some 30 years now, there have been different federal-provincial agreements concerning culture and heritage. I will of course refer to the province of Quebec.
In Quebec, the Department of Culture, Communications and the Status of Women is responsible for the funding provided for operations. For its part, the federal government funds finite projects, that have a beginning and an end.
A little earlier, I was explaining perhaps awkwardly that in a museum, preparing an exhibition or a research project is always an operation that takes from two and a half to four years. Given the way in which programs have always been set up, it is possible to solicit funds from the Exhibition Circulation Fund of the Museums Assistance Program, for instance, for the planning phase alone. But then you must come back the following year, and go through the whole competition for the execution phase, and yet a third competition for circulation.
This means that several of these projects will, so to speak, die on the Order Paper, because the funding is not guaranteed from the time of the first funding request. I think that several institutions have experienced difficulties because of that. We had a hard time ourselves with one travelling exhibition, among others. Although we had been told that we would get circulation funding, because the opening date of that exhibition fell in the next fiscal year, we were not entitled to that money.
There are many similar situations that need to be reviewed. In my opening statement, I emphasized the need to make certain conditions more flexible. This type of condition is one of them. You need a lot of time, energy and resources to prepare these funding requests. These resources are often allocated to prepare an application for a project that would go on for three years. When at the end we cannot put it on because of certain parameters outside of our control, we can get quite discouraged and simply not apply. It is that simple. There is too much hard work involved for results that are sometimes disappointing, particularly in the case of 50-50 funding.