Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair, committee members, my name is Jodie Stark, and I'm vice-president of legal and corporate affairs at Concentra Financial. Our head office is located in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I'm please to have the opportunity to present to all of you today. Concentra Fin

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I certainly applaud the government's initiatives with regard to financial literacy. I would like to see more consultation with the credit union system. On the first go-round, there wasn't the opportunity for credit unions to be consulted on financial literacy models. Yet that i

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Certainly. Thank you for the question. The main difference between credit unions and traditional banks or other financial institutions is in their governance model itself. Credit unions, generally speaking, have a membership within a certain region or area. Because of that, the

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I wouldn't suggest that we fit within a hierarchy. Basically, most of what we do at Concentra is to act as an intermediary or a wholesale provider. So we are the intermediary between the credit union and the credit union's members. So if a credit union member comes forward and ne

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  From reading the information that's gone around, I believe that some of the regulators involved with the federal trust legislation may have been speaking in British Columbia, though I could be wrong. I think I've heard on a couple of occasions the question posed to credit unions,

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  We can submit that to you.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Yes, they can. We do have the federal power—

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  That's right. We have the federal power to do anything. Now, initially, we were doing a lot more work directly with consumers, and what we've done in the last couple of years, at the request of credit unions in the system, is moved away from that and become more of an financial i

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  —servicing credit unions in particular. But certainly, a lot of our trust work is still directly with members or directly with people.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Yes. Most of the transactions we do are set up that way so that the ultimate client doesn't see our involvement in it, and the agreements and the relationship are between us and the credit union and sometimes other credit unions. There might be a consortium of various credit unio

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  We don't consult with the members on the various specific transactions that we do. It's more on the overall strategy—what strategy and how we position ourselves in the credit union system—that the members consult with us on, through our board. The board is structured such that t

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Sure. For example, have restructured our social responsibility platform at Concentra over the last year and a half, and we set aside a certain amount of money each year and then allow credit unions from across Canada to submit submissions for particular initiatives that they are

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We don't do direct lending to cooperatives so much. We have provided lines of credit to cooperatives, and have been involved in social housing projects in Toronto to a great extent, because we partner with the credit unions on that. So I can't really speak

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  The brief was submitted to your clerk approximately two days ago, so I imagine it's just in the translation process right now.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  That's correct. In the 2010 numbers I have, I believe it's around 4% of pre-tax earnings of credit unions nationally that is given to the community as compared to 1% for traditional banks.