In Saskatchewan, for example, there is a management committee which studies funding requests that have already been analyzed once by Canadian Heritage. The management committee is comprised of members from the community, including members of the Assemblée communautaire fransaskoise. It is a subcommittee which meets and makes recommendations to Heritage Canada.
In Newfoundland, until this year, there was a committee comprised of bilingual and francophone people who were not active within the community and who did not have the right to be members of another organization or committee, and which decided on behalf of the community how to invest the money or funding. Further, this committee did not ask any questions of the community; it simply received the requests.
When I was a member of the ACF, I evaluated funding applications, and I can tell you that we had questions with regard to every application. We therefore held public meetings.
It is rather difficult to accept that a group of people, who are not active in the community and who don't really know the community, make decisions without even putting questions to those proposing projects in order to obtain clarification, and then recommend to Canadian Heritage who should obtain funding.
In Newfoundland, people said that there was no other process in place and that it was the same everywhere, when that is not the case. We had discussions with Canadian Heritage, of course, and we were told that they would give us that flexibility.