Thank you.
Mr. Padfield, I'll direct some of my questions, as a member from eastern Ontario, to the experience as an MP in southern Ontario here. I've had some members comment that a local community futures program was ready to accept funding, but was very slow to receive it from FedDev. When it did, it received only a small amount. Despite the RRRF being awarded a large sum of money overall—I believe initially it was $962 million, which increased to $2 billion—the money that was given to frontline agencies to administer the program was smaller than they anticipated.
One of the other interesting things that was noted in the report was that there was obviously a large subscription into these programs, and they couldn't accommodate all of it, yet at the end of the year there was still money left over.
I'm just wondering if you could talk about the process. If the staff and infrastructure at community futures programs have been around for the last 30 years, what was the delay in getting funds to them, particularly surplus funds that were still left on the table at the end of the year?