It's quite a rigorous process. As you can imagine, we're obviously dealing with large amounts of taxpayers' money. Not only are we dealing with large amounts of taxpayers' money, we're dealing with people's lives and economic interests and, in many cases, the lives and economic interests of communities as well. It has been a very scary time for many Canadians and many Canadian communities, and certainly our staff hear that all the time when they're dealing with these people.
There are two categories of things that we look at. In Western Economic Diversification we did a call for proposals. We got almost 1,500 on the RInC side of things and just about 1,100 on the CAF side of things. The criteria for the program are actually up on our website, so any Canadian can look at that website and see exactly what the criteria are.
I'll just run through some of them quickly, because I think they're important. First of all, for CAF, the project had to be located in rural communities with a single industry. That was one of the program criteria. It also needed to create jobs and maintain employment; in other words, if it was a great project to do something, but it wasn't really going to create or maintain much employment, that was a big knock against it.
The project needed to leverage funds from provinces, territories, or other funding partners. That was a strong preference. I mentioned in my opening remarks that in some of these things, and I think it was in RInC in particular, we leveraged a figure of $430 million from other partners that probably wouldn't otherwise have been there. It needed to build on partnership arrangements that were already in place and the reason for that was to move quickly: don't build new things in terms of relationships with other players if you don't need to, but go ahead with what's already in place. And ideally, it was to provide a longer legacy of long-term economic benefits.
Those were all criteria, but then there were some other things on top of that. First of all, what was being proposed had to be completed by March 31, 2011. If you couldn't get started until next year, for whatever set of reasons, then it didn't fit. What was being proposed needed to make sure that it provided benefits to communities affected by the global economic recession. In other words, again, it was tying this to need. Also, it needed to create immediate and short-term employment, start quickly, be incremental, and not simply replace projects that were going to go ahead otherwise.
We considered all of those things in a very vigorous due diligence process and made sure every project that was being considered met all of those criteria.