I think I understand what you're asking, Mr. Savage, and I'll give you an example of a meeting that occurred as recently as this morning. But first I'll take you back to just before our budget.
I received a letter from the executive director of the local chapter of the Canadian Mental Health Association indicating that he had distinct concerns about housing for persons who had mental health issues and the difficulty with those individuals being able to maintain housing, even if it was available, because of the mental health issues they had. They were having difficulty maintaining the housing and would often end up in the...[Inaudible--Editor]...system while, if they had just had some support, they would have been able to stay in their own units. So he first approached me by letter indicating he would like some special funding from me, as I happen to be Minister of Housing as well, to be able to address that issue. I had some meetings with him and we came up with some money.
We have a program that we call rent supplementation. If we don't have units available to give to people, we will take money and give it to private landlords. This goes back to Ms. Yelich's question. We went to private landlords who own apartment buildings here in the city. For instance, in a lot of apartment buildings there will be ten units designated that we can use as a government to place people in if we don't have adequate social housing stock ourselves. We will provide the rental supplement to them and they will be able to move into these private buildings.
The Canadian Mental Health executive director wanted to get access to that, and just this morning we had our final meeting. We had 500 new rent supplements that we were able to provide in our budget this year on top of the 1,000 that we already provided, so it's 1,500 in total. We basically carved out a percentage of those for the Canadian Mental Health Association. We will give them the funding; they will work with their clients to find adequate and suitable housing to help people with mental health needs in a supportive environment. They know those things better than we do, and so we'll give them that.
There are accountability measures, reporting measures, and all that kind of stuff, but we sat down, had a dialogue, and had a couple of meetings--literally, it was a couple of meetings, it wasn't a long process--and they now have a source of funds that they can use to help house their clients.
I hope that answers what you were asking.