We've been involved since the beginning of the program many years ago with the government and FPAC and so forth. That has allowed us a lot of potential in our industry to improve product cost and productivity and so on. The green transformation program was related mostly to existing assets and to improving the current assets.
The problem is that we've had a period of very challenging times and difficulty accessing money. The green transformation program helped many of us in the industry to get from one quartile to the next on the cost curve. It did made a difference so that perhaps 50% more assets weren't closed in the last five or seven years. They're here today and they're thriving and they're building and developing and so forth. That program, I think, was key in keeping many assets thriving today.
I hope that answered the question.
I think IFIT has been a good program. A lot of good projects have come out of it. Under the recent renewal, which I think I mentioned earlier, it was oversubscribed more than 10 times, with a billion dollars plus in projects submitted versus $94 million or $96 million being available over the two- or three-year period. So further to the points made by my colleagues earlier, a lot of good research has been done, but to finance those projects today we need government assistance.
As was mentioned by my colleague earlier, we can't go to our bank or typical financial institution to finance these projects. We don't get the money, so we need the provincial and federal governments' assistance to move forward.
Tons of projects are available today to get us to another level of competition.