Through you, Madam Chair, thank you for the question. The current definition in the Building Canada fund of a “small” community is a community that has a population of less than 100,000. Smaller provinces have only a number of communities that are larger than that.
What we want to do is sit down with the provinces and really understand how they see a small community, how they define a rural community, and create that flexibility for every province to see what role the federal government can play in supporting those communities. We are not going to be defining from a federal perspective what a small community should look like. I think that cookie cutter approach is not really effective and has not worked. We're going to sit down and we'll be flexible in finding more appropriate ways of supporting those rural, northern, and small communities.