I am very pleased to answer the question, Madam Chair.
You know, Churence, I also come from rural Canada. My riding is 37,000 square kilometres. You and I share a passion, in terms of making sure our smaller, rural communities will have services.
We've done a couple of things. First of all, we've made sure that as we look at infrastructure, we have a dedicated stream for northern and rural communities. There's a good reason for that. We understood that we needed to be more flexible. I'll give you an example. In northern Saskatchewan, they were saying, “Minister, if you allow us to use those funds to extend the runway by a few hundred metres, we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, facilitate transportation and reduce the cost of food in northern communities.” That, for example, would be admissible. That's why we left the program very flexible. .
The other thing we said, in recognition of the fiscal capacity of smaller communities—those below 500,000 residents—was that the federal government would go up to 60% in the funding, which would leave the province with 33%, and smaller communities with 7%. For me, this is really transformational. You would know that, historically, we have this rule of one-third, one-third and one-third. We heard from small communities across Canada that this is not sustainable. When you are a small community of a few hundred people, sometimes there's no way you can finance a $12-million project, for example, to replace the pipes necessary to provide drinking water.
Not only did we listen, but we decided to act, provide more flexibility and increase the funding in smaller communities to allow these projects to go through.