Thank you, Madam Chair. I'll be sharing my time with my colleague Mr. Hardie.
Minister Sohi, thank you for being here.
As you know and have been keen to discuss with me before, I primarily represent small towns and rural communities. When it comes to infrastructure funding, there are some historical challenges that the communities I represent have faced. The smaller they are, the bigger the challenge, it seems. The primary challenge is that historically there has been a requirement that these smaller communities chip in maybe a third of the cost of a project, for example. One of the things this leads to is that rural communities often miss out on having any presence of the federal government in their community, which particularly compounds the social problem of young people leaving our communities because they're less vibrant and they don't have access to the same resources that others do.
Our rural caucus has been advocating for a change in the way we do things, to have a carve-out for small towns and rural communities and to change the share that small communities are required to contribute in order to access federal infrastructure funding. What's your plan to make sure that small communities like the ones that I represent in Pictou County and Antigonish on the eastern shore aren't left behind when it comes to federal infrastructure dollars?