In June 2010, we moved from calls for proposals at fixed dates to a system where we were accepting applications all year. That's going to be two years ago this spring. There were benefits for us in managing the peaks and valleys of workloads and making the best use of our resources, but the primary driver was benefits to groups. Groups were not always able to align the funding from the various sources. These dates, these deadlines, could be different for the federal government, the provincial government, or the municipal government, and they were all seeking support for specific initiatives. By removing our deadline, we gave them more flexibility and the ability to work with whatever the deadline of the remaining funder was, and we would just hop along on that.
On February 29th, 2012. See this statement in context.