Traditionally, when we go into the offshore markets into dollars, or euros, Swiss francs, or Aussie dollars, we're always looking as to how we can swap the liability back into Canadian dollars—that's our traditional approach to the capital markets. We're looking there to solve for savings for the taxpayers, actually, as well as getting the diversity.
In the case of the offshore RMB bond issue we did in 2013 and 2014, in neither case were we able to make the economics work, where we could swap the liability back into Canadian dollars as something that was economic compared to our domestic cost of borrowing at the time. What we did was borrow in RMB and we put those moneys in a secure investment with a high-quality, high-grade entity. It's not really the purpose of the exercise, but in fact we've hedged our FX because we have an investment now that's denominated in RMB, and we're actually generating a positive carry on the investment versus our cost, so we are making a small profit.
The marketplace in offshore RMB, bringing the liability back into the home currency, is something that, for an entity like British Columbia, a high-grade province with very low cost of funds, we're not yet able to make those economics work. Nor, for example, have other entities that have gone into this market, including the United Kingdom, most recently in October 2014; or the World Bank; or KfW, which is the German counterpart to the EDC. They've also issued in renminbi.
That is a current reality of this marketplace, so we did not bring that liability back into Canada. It's not to say we couldn't, but we couldn't do it at a favourable cost for us, from a treasury perspective. What we wanted to achieve, certainly, was the diversity. We wanted to be a first mover in a market that we believe has a very strong future. By getting that name recognition, we think there's a dividend paid to the province, as well as forging that relationship.