Yes. I'd be happy to speak to that, and I can turn to my colleague Mr. Dagenais to talk a bit more about the specific process.
It's just to say that we opened a portal for applications to both the UBF and the rapid response stream. With the rapid response stream, we had about 10 times more applications for shovel-ready projects than were anticipated.
I'll be very frank with the committee. Had we known in advance that we were going to get an avalanche of shovel-ready projects, we might have set things up a little differently. Part of the delay.... The upside was that we had a lot more interest in the program than had been anticipated. As a result, some of the adjudication took longer than we would have wanted.
The universal broadband fund was a different sort of issue. The government announced the UBF. I think, at the time, it was about a billion dollars. As I noted in earlier remarks, a number of provinces stepped up right away and said, “Actually, we would like to match the money and work with you.” In effect, it was that activity by the provinces that allowed us to rethink some of the investment, like doing more in fibre optics, for example.
Quebec is the best example. Within a matter of weeks of the UBF being announced, Quebec announced that it wanted to fibre up the whole province, and it was going to make this major investment to do so. The result of that was that we had to put a pause on some of the investment activities. Rather than do what we would normally do, which is put out an RFP, get applications, adjudicate and then pick the applications and make the investment, we had provinces with significant money actively interested in investing.
In some cases, obviously, they came to the table with views. They had a view of the kinds of investments they wanted to make. Quebec, for example, was quite adamant that it wanted to make sure that it was fibre optics investment. That was not in the original conditions of our program. It would have allowed a broader range of technology.
In the case of Ontario, even though we had substantial resources available, they would not have been enough to cover the entire province. With the provincial government's investment, we could do a lot more, but obviously the province—as you would expect—is a sovereign level of government. It had views. Where it wanted to invest, we had already done an intake process. We had applications on the table. We needed to let Ontario look at what we had to see whether or not it matched its priorities.
There was a bit of effort involved to try to make sure that, when we did the work, we did it in a complementary fashion with our provincial partners. Frankly, that delayed the execution. The downside was that it delayed the execution. The upside that was we wound up with significant leverage for the federal dollars. It was a lot more money than we had originally anticipated spending, which allowed us to both increase coverage and provide higher-quality coverage.
In terms of the specifics—