Absolutely. Janna did touch on it a little bit in her opening statement.
For many of the communities here in Nova Scotia, a lot of their own-source revenue is generated via gaming or fishing. At the time of the pandemic, one of the first decisions made by the provincial government, without any prior consultation with the communities, was to shut down their gaming facilities. Due to that, we also did not at that time have the programming in place, so the communities turned to their own-source revenue and had to make decisions to cut many positions in their community. A lot of the non-essential services were cut. Many who stayed on were in leadership, health and the little EMO support they did have.
Because these are individuals who support communities to access funds, when all of the information overload in programming came down, the ability to access that funding became impaired. As Janna MacKay mentioned, they turned to tribal organizations like ours, which did not have funding per se in place to deal with COVID. Nobody did, but they turned to us, and we were able to kind of turn into an EMO office where we used existing staff that are hired through other programs to help support communities to write proposals. That was on individuals who were already doing other jobs.
When you have to cut positions in already reduced-capacity positions, the ability to access that funding becomes more difficult, and as a result missed opportunities happened and there was more dependence on OSR, own-source revenue, which in turn created more debt. That's what we saw.