Good morning, everybody.
The infrastructure and economic needs have grown to the point at which first nations have said that rather than stand in line and hope the federal government points at you and says “It's your turn“, they have said they're willing to start putting up their own money to try to solve the infrastructure gap.
When you take a look at the Canadian population on average, it's growing here, but first nations population is growing there. To stand in line means that every year you're falling further behind. A prime example of what our loans are doing can be seen if you drive south to a town called Penticton. If you look on the Penticton lands, you'll see that where there used to be land, there's now infrastructure and housing being built. One of the most wonderful stories was a report from their CEO, who said here's the number of jobs our community members got for the construction; here's the number of jobs that are going to continue; here's the number of trades that were developed.
We are at the point where we have 205 first nations standing in front of our door. The capital markets are saying that is much more than anybody expected. It's a great story, but in order to maintain confidence that those 205 have an adequate cookie jar behind them in case something goes wrong—and nothing's gone wrong in four years—but in the what-if scenario is sometimes growth begets demand. For us to continue to duplicate the Penticton story across all 205, we're at the point at which our balance has to grow with the client demand.
If you say, “Why don't they just go to banks?”, the first question is where do banks get their money? They get their money from the capital market, the same place, so if you go to a bank, they borrow it and mark it up. When you start marking up loans for profit—which is what a bank and credit union should do, because that's how they survive—the dollars go less far when you build.
We go directly to the capital markets. We lend at cost. We only cover our costs, there's no profit motive because we're not-for-profit, which means the infrastructure gap comes down quicker. Certainly, it's the first nations' demands themselves that cause us to be here today.