Yes. Thank you.
I would start by saying that the community volunteer income tax program is a very important one that we've worked on quite aggressively over the last number of years. At the core of it, it's really an effort by us to try to reach some of these people whom we might not normally be able to reach. How do you do that? How do you encourage them to file a tax return so that they can get the benefits they're eligible for? The laws of the land say that you can't get them unless you file.
This is our effort to get into the community, build the trust we can with some of the community members, and have some volunteers help people file their tax returns and get the benefits they need. It's something we've had for a while now. We've been trying to improve it over time. As I noted, during the pandemic we had to pivot a little bit to go more to a virtual format, because these were predominantly in person, and we couldn't do that at the beginning of the pandemic. We did pivot, and we have great support from the communities that we're engaged with.
What we did recently, and that was in the announcement, was provide some grants to these community associations to help defray some of the costs they have to incur when they're providing the support. It could be something like paper, computers, that sort of thing. As they're trying to help the members of their community in these hard-to-reach areas, we have a program that allows us to compensate them for some of those expenses.
Minister Lebouthillier announced recently some changes to that to make it more effective, provide greater assistance, and target better some communities across the land, including indigenous communities. It's a way for us to get into the communities and try to help the people within those communities, with the support of others.