Yes. There is the Building Communities Through Arts and Heritage Program, which was created to help small local festivals. A number of you know that program because events in your ridings benefit from its assistance. The program was announced in Budget 2007. The Canadian Heritage Minister at the time, Ms. Verner, officially announced the launch of the program in September 2007. We were already in negotiations with Treasury Board in order to obtain the terms and conditions and spending authorities, and we were immediately able to set an application deadline, i.e., January 2008, for events that were about to happen, during the same year for certain anniversaries, and thereafter as of April 1.
Generally, there is a development period when we consider our terms and conditions. And we have to plan the rollout of project assistance. In this case, we were aiming for 2008-2009, which was okay, as funding had already been provided for 2007-2008. We moved fairly quickly, with the authorizations being drawn up at the same time as the funding announcement was made.
We usually need a little more time. Earlier you talked about festival funding. A good number of festivals require a fair bit of time to prepare their events programming for the following summer, and that is why the department has application deadlines that correspond to their needs based on previous years.