Thank you so much.
Once again, this has been very beneficial, because I didn't realize just how disadvantaged rural areas were until I started looking at the different tables and the amounts.
Your table around food supply shows that none of them are eligible. Grain elevators in Saskatchewan and Manitoba are not eligible. It's the same for fisheries sites, horticultural facilities, hunting and resource harvesting sites.
It's the same under “Religion, Ritual and Funeral”, aboriginal ritual sites, aboriginal sacred sites, missions, and religious facilities and institutions. Then you look under water transport at landing points or lighthouses, and then even buried sites, exposed sites, and underwater sites. These are all rural areas, for the most part, that are not eligible under this program at all.
Not only are we going to be disadvantaged because we're not as well-heeled.... Just look at the lighthouses. A number of years ago when we started shutting down lighthouses and communities were scrambling to try to find money to keep these lighthouses open, most of them ended up not being allowed to be open.
My real concerns, once again, are that, one, we need to change this so that more of these rural sites become eligible; and two, because of the inability of rural communities to raise the kind of money that it takes to rehabilitate these sites, we need some form of targeted or focused method to be able to say, “Okay, this portion is going to go specifically to rural” so that we have that ability.