In the context of the community consultation process, the communities have established recommendation committees, essentially review committees that re-examine all the applications for their communities. These are people who have declared that they are not in a situation of conflict of interest with respect to the proposals submitted by the groups seeking funding. These people have to review all the funding proposals, whether it be for operating funding or for project funding.
All the funding applications are forwarded to the Department of Canadian Heritage. The officers then prepare the binders which include all the applications and preliminary analyses designed to help the committees do their work. They are indeed quite large binders. Sometimes there are three or four binders of funding proposals, but they nevertheless contain information that helps committee members make recommendations on the priorities and projects that are accepted.