I noticed that there was a lot of discussion about this last week, and this is bound to come up. And as Senator Carney said, this is not a money bill. It cannot be a money bill, originally being in the Senate. And I think everyone's kind of dancing around the question and they really want to ask what this is going to cost.
I don't know what it's going to cost. I would say that if you're talking about maintenance of lighthouses—and I think that's one of the reasons this bill is here—a building that no longer has a use tends to become neglected. If some of these structures are now being cycled out of use, they will be left and neglected.
If the bill is saying that if it's designated a heritage facility then there has to be some minimum expenditure in order to maintain these places so they don't degrade, then there will be a cost associated with that. And I would say that, with what you heard last week from Fisheries and Oceans, there's no ability in your existing budget to take care of heritage character buildings, because that's not within their mandate. So that will have to be identified as a function, and there would be some costs assigned to that. I mean, this won't happen unless there's some expenditure of dollars.
And when there are provisions in the bill for maintenance, again, you have to have a maintenance schedule. There has to logically be some costs assigned to that. But I don't see this as a major sudden upsweep in restoration. As Natalie Bull of Heritage Canada said last week, this is not a bill to suddenly turn these places into historic theme parks, where you have huge budgets to restore everything and make them ideal sites for presentation. They aren't necessarily all going to settle and become museums. Some of them might, especially on the east coast or in Ontario, but much less so on the west coast, where lighthouses are still mostly functioning, whether they're staffed or not. But I see that their logic will be that there will be some costs associated here.
I think another factor to consider here is that the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, through the Parks Canada Agency, has had a cost-sharing program for a number of years for national and historic sites. If it's a national and historic site and it can be in private hands, it can be a store. Rogers' Chocolates in Victoria is a national historic site. All kinds of different places can be national historic sites. But if you're a public entity, you can apply to the national cost-sharing program for some money.
Well, the way to keep a lid on that spending is simply by putting a lid on the budget. And they're saying, well, okay, it's $2 million; that's it, that's all there is. It's not a question of how much you need and that's what the budget is. The question is how much we are willing to allocate. So there's always that side of the decision, saying, okay, there's a pot of money for this maintenance program and these sites can apply to this pot of money. But they can easily put a lid on that amount of money. And that lid is often set by saying how much we're willing to spend.
So that's the same with local governments when they make money available. The City of Vancouver is providing density to buildings, to incentivate them. They now are doing a complete reassessment of that program because they don't want to create too much density, and they're also looking at the gap between how much it takes to make a building become rehabilitated in a marketplace situation and how much they're willing to spend.
So it's give and take. It will be negotiated.