It's huge. I believe it's overextended at the moment. It's a program that has proved its merit. The previous government had funded it at a certain level. We've doubled that amount and changed the rules to make it more accessible and to cover more things.
This is for communities—it might be a school, a church, or a community centre of some kind—that feel themselves vulnerable to hate crimes and other kinds of activities that are threatening and that create public safety issues. They can apply to the program for reasonably modest financial assistance to help them make their facilities more resilient. It could be fences, better doors and locks, or closed-circuit cameras. It could simply be the film that you put across a window that protects the window from breaking easily and at the same time obscures what you see through the window.
The uptake has been very good. What we are now proposing is that twice a year, in the middle of the year and at the end of the year, we issue calls for proposals and people are entitled to apply to the program. The Government of Canada will assess the application in terms of whether they are truly in a vulnerable position, and whether what they are proposing to do is likely to make them feel more secure. There are a great many people who maybe didn't know about the program before, or it just wasn't flexible enough, in its previous iteration, to do what they wanted it to do. Judging by the response, this is a program that—for a relatively modest amount of money, when you consider the totality of the federal budget—is hitting the target in terms of what people need.