I think the way it's been borne out is that, from what I've seen in Manitoba, it creates partnerships.
There are two things here. First, there's this fishing passion. To my mind, this is an intelligent, targeted grant. It's targeting a bunch of us passionate kooks who spend too much of our own time and money on this. The thing about fishing is this passion, which I'll come back to. The thing about the grant is that it leverages the passion. That's a lot of money across Canada. It's not a lot of money in the big picture of the federal budget, I would argue, but it's a lot of money to us. It's a lot of money from a leverage perspective. When you put that money in, you'll get way more than that back from us in our own money.
Those grants are never enough to pay for the whole project, which I think is brilliant. One time I had a donor, when I used to work for another organization, who said, “Don't give an organization too much money, because it will take away their drive for fundraising.” There's a magic about a grant size, right? The right size of grant is significant enough to get a project moving, but it's not so much that it takes away the need to raise other moneys. You want provincial money in there. We want the local community to fundraise and raise dollars too. There's a magic about that. The big thing it does, though, is it creates partnerships in stewardship. It makes the local community feel supported by the federal government. It makes them feel energized.
So there's a real good thing there, but it's the recreational passion thing that drives it. You're tapping into that with that grant, and that is brilliant. That's a brilliant thing to do. I would say, “Where else can you do that?”
It's an incredible strategy, in my mind, for a government to take. I think it's smart.