We extended it by five weeks to, again, deal with some of the challenges that some of the remote and smaller communities were facing in putting together a meaningful proposal. This is really about our desire to help those smaller, remote, and rural communities, but we're very confident that we can roll this out in a timely manner, that we can see not only meaningful investments in the short term but in the long term as well, and also leverage other investment opportunities.
This fund that we put forward is a $500-million initiative from the federal government, but we'll leverage with the private sector potentially. We believe it can easily be up to about a billion dollars and that's a significant investment to the probably 300 to 400 targeted rural and remote communities that will benefit from it.
We obviously want to take advantage of the construction season. We obviously want to see this rolled out in a timely manner. We're working on this and it's a priority for our government.