Thank you.
Colleagues, we have about five minutes left in this session, and we have a subcommittee at 5 p.m. I have a couple of questions I wouldn't mind asking. I don't know if members want to push this further, or if we can finish at 5:00, and then do the subcommittee. Thank you.
I just wanted to mention, perhaps to Ms. Gavan, an article by John Greenwood in the Financial Post. I think a lot of members have touched on it. I just want to repeat it because this, it seems to me, is the rub of the issue, and I just want to quote from the article.
It talks about your board indicating that, after 140 years of being a mutual company, you're considering demutualization. Then he says:
If the industry follows the route taken by the big life insurers which demutualized at the end of the 1990s, the money would get distributed in the form of shares to “participating policy holders.”
Then he goes on to say:
But here’s the twist. Like a handful of other property and casualty companies, Economical was very selective about who got to own its participating policies. While it has more than 700,000 cash policies outstanding, there are only 943 mutual policyholders — about 0.2% of the total. According to the company, about one-third are held by company employees and brokers. If the surplus gets distributed evenly to this upper tier, each holder would stand to collect a life-changing $1.3-million.
That is the issue that I think has to be addressed by you, Ms. Gavan, before the committee.