Through the chair, thank you for the question.
I guess the housing accelerator fund was one of the most recent ones, and I've already spoken about that. It's restrictive because of the housing needs assessment, but the application itself is also hugely onerous. It is difficult to complete.
I've had this conversation. Again, through the FCM, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, we have advocacy days in Ottawa. Those are hugely successful. I met with a couple of MPs there. One of the conversations we had was around potentially two different funding streams, maybe with funding applications for smaller and rural communities and then a funding application for a city. You don't want to differentiate between sizes of municipalities—we're all municipalities and we all do the same work—but again, there's the question of that capacity level for smaller municipalities to be able to do funding.
We have a robust staff. We have a fair number of managers in our departments within Tantramar. They do good work. They do funding applications all the time, and some are easier than others, but there are municipalities within this province and, I would guess, in provinces across the country, where you have a CAO, a chief administrative officer, who maybe is also the clerk, and that's about it. Maybe some of that funding work falls onto municipally elected officials. Chances are that they don't know how to do funding applications.
Having greater access to applications and simplifying them would help municipalities greatly. The housing accelerator fund is the most recent example, though.