That's a very good question. Thank you, Mr. Battiste.
When COVID-19 started, it became very clear to us that a lot of our borrowing members were going to have revenue streams interrupted because of social distancing. A lot of them operate VLT lounges in their communities right across the country or are involved in some type of usage revenue streams—tobacco, gas—and with not a lot of people travelling and the rebate, this was all going to be interrupted. We took immediate action, went to our board and gave a few options to our board. By the way, our board is made up of our borrowing members. They are chiefs or councillors from each first nation that is a borrower with us, so we have strong leadership at that level.
We brought forward a plan that would help us get through this time. The board actually agreed to that and gave us the direction to deal with it as emergencies came up. What really happened was that a lot of the revenues that first nations had from their own-source revenues to service different loans were being redirected to community emergencies as needed. We worked with them carefully through that.
Now, going forward, what we see is that our borrowing members are ready to participate in kick-starting the economy. We know that Canada is going to need to do that and that there's going to be stimulus coming. The infrastructure gap in our communities is about $35 billion. This addresses a lot of things like the overcrowding and adequate water and sewer infrastructure. We see these types of projects that need to be funded immediately in the next few years should we ever come across a pandemic like this again in the future.
We feel that with the First Nations Finance Authority we have the machinery in place to utilize annual government infrastructure dollars through appropriations and to leverage that into the capital markets, thereby really making a big dent in this infrastructure gap. That's sort of what we see.
I'm going to ask my colleague Steve Berna if he wants to add anything else to that.