Yes, certainly. Thank you very much for the question.
So far in the projects we've approved under the CAF program, 51,000 person-months of employment have been created, which we think is a significant volume. Those are the numbers reported to us by the proponents of these projects. We've obviously gone through them with a fine-tooth comb to see whether we think that's the case.
Under the CAF, which is a smaller program, again, it's a number that we think is substantial. Just about 24,000 person-months of employment have been created under that program, for a total under the two programs, in the last five months when we've been putting out approvals on these things, of just under 75,000 person-months of employment.
While those things are important, I would provide a couple of pieces of colour commentary. One of the things we're finding in these two programs is that we're sometimes dealing with a whole clientele that we haven't dealt with before. What's interesting is the number of arenas and facilities we're fixing up that are called centennial facilities, things that were built to celebrate Canada's centennial in 1967. A lot of those things haven't had a lot of attention since then.
We look at the fact that we're doing a lot of this work in rural Canada. The impact it has on these communities is significant. Not only does it mean that people can actually live and work near their families and their homes, it also means those communities, in a bunch of cases, reduce the amount of energy it takes to actually run those arenas. When your annual budget is next to nothing and 90% of it is spent on fixing up roads and picking up garbage, the decision on an extra couple of hundred dollars or a thousand dollars a month for an arena can sometimes be the difference between continuing to make it functional and it not being functional.
It's one of the things we found that is very different in this program. While the employment numbers are certainly very important, one of the things we're getting comments on from people is the impact it's having on their day-to-day lives.
It's a different story from what we get with our normal projects, and I think it's something that all of the staff who have had the opportunity to deal with these things have found. We normally chase after CFOs, business managers, and so on, for information. We have these really fascinating stories, like staff being told by a president of a local curling association who has a $12,000 project to replace the curling rink, “I have to feed my children now, so you'll simply have to wait until next week”. It talks about where we're having an impact. It's a different place from where we normally go.
We know that these projects, when you get into these small communities, have an impact that's completely disproportionate to even some of the larger projects we do in cities.