The National Association of Friendship Centres is funded through Heritage Canada's aboriginal friendship centre program. That trickles down to the national association. The national association has provincial and territorial associations across Canada.
New Brunswick does not have a provincial or a territorial association. The Fredericton Native Friendship Centre is the only one in the province. So when you go east, you go to Halifax, but in St. John's and Happy Valley, they also don't have provincial or territorial associations. So that has blocked us even longer from receiving our funding.
When they were in negotiations to try to get more funding and we wanted to upgrade our funding allocations—which have not been upgraded since 1996, meaning that I've had the same funding at my centre for that long—we had to cut back and tie up any strings we could and change anything we could within the centre to get our operating costs lower when we were waiting for that funding. We did not have to lay off anybody, but we did have to cut back on what we were offering for about three months. This was because there were negotiations, and agreements were not signed and amendments were going back and forth. So it just tied us up really, really badly.
We're very grateful and lucky to have a positive working relationship with our bank, so they were able to extend us a bit to help us to at least leave our doors open.