I was referring to all levels of government. In recent years, at the provincial level, there have been a lot of budget cuts across the board. A number of organizations used to receive a grant of less than $10,000, but it was eliminated. At the municipal level, in light of the new heritage legislation, the resource expertise was not transferred. The provincial grants for the maintenance of buildings considered municipal were scrapped five years ago.
The municipalities don't have a lot of money for heritage. In cases where there was some money available for that, the percentage of assistance went down from 40% to 25% or 20% for a heritage building.
Let me talk about something else. As I pointed out earlier, there are artisan-caretakers who take care of the heritage homes and do the conservation. They have been with us for 20 or 25 years because of their craft. Unfortunately, they no longer have the right to work on our buildings because they don't have competency cards in construction. As a result, we have to pay two to three times more to preserve the buildings. First, we lose grants, and second, we have to pay more for the services of our craftsmen.
I'm going to give you an example. There is a bridge not far from us. The government took four years to renovate it, and we lost all the rental income during those four years and even afterwards. This will soon be the case for another building. As I said, it's been a double whammy for the past three or four years, and now we have to think about getting rid of buildings.