That's a multipronged question, but I appreciate it. I'll do my best to be efficient.
On open banking, we've been working on this since at least 2018 under the previous minister, Bill Morneau, who launched the first process on this. We've been working and waiting since then for some kind of federally regulated and legislated framework on open banking.
Our most important objective as a credit union sector has been that credit unions should have the ability and opportunity, but not the obligation, to participate in an open banking framework. That's recognizing the different needs of 200 smaller, co-operatively owned financial institutions. That has been reflected in most of the work that we have seen come out of finance and the government so far. We obviously eagerly await next week's budget to see what that's going to look like from a legislative point of view.
As we know, budgets are legislated over a long time horizon. Here we are in April 2024 talking about budget 2023. If the open banking components of this year's budget are in the second budget bill in the fall, then there's a good chance that goes into next year. That gets into the opportunity of being disrupted by an election. Obviously, we have no control over the timing of that.
It depends on what happens in the next 12 to 15 months legislatively with open banking, whether it indeed passes into law, and the framework that the minister is set to propose next week. We would hope that if there was an election or if there was any delay related to that, then whoever is successful in that election and in running the country after the fact would take that into account and not impose any further delays. We've been waiting since 2018. Obviously, there's been a pandemic and lots of other issues in the interim that the government's had to deal with. We would hope that it would be a priority for whoever comes into power.