I would start by saying that, first of all, the federal government doesn't need to own the short-term funding problem. It's across the board. It's with all funders, or a lot of the funders—territorial funders, even non-governmental funders. There's this tendency to fund short term.
Funders always want to fund the new project, something that's never been done before. They often don't want to fund this ongoing project that we've been doing for 10 years and works. They want to fund a new part of that. That's another part of that problem.
We love federal funding. We apply for it all the time. We receive federal funding. We're funded right now by Health Canada. We're one of the Indian residential school programs. We represent Baffin Island for that program. That funding partially funds the counsellor training program that I'm talking about. It's awesome. I wish it were for more than one year at a time. We have to apply for it every year. Every year they say they don't know if we'll get it next year: maybe we'll get it next year. They'll tell us later if we're going to get it once we get the application in.
It makes my job really difficult. Instead of figuring out how we're going to make our program better, I'm scrambling around trying to figure out if we'll be funded next year. Our counsellors also have a really difficult time. They're asking me all time if they're working here next year or if they need to start looking for another job. It makes it so.... But I won't go down that rabbit hole.
In terms of the criteria being too narrow, I can't think of a specific example of when that stopped us. I think we may have a higher capacity in our organization to write proposals, so I would only be able to speak for our organization on that. I think sometimes it might be too narrow. Sometimes it might be too bureaucratic to get through that. Sometimes we have to hire consultants to help us walk through the application process.