That's a huge issue. That's the tax issue that I mentioned in my opening remarks, which is effectively an update of the definition of “credit union” in the Income Tax Act from the 53-year-old definition that's currently on the books. That effectively, today—until, one hopes, this bill passes—limits what CRA considers to be so-called credit union income to a very narrow band of what may have represented the majority of the credit unions sector's revenues in 1971. I wasn't around then. I imagine the world was different. Our business model was certainly different. It's had to evolve in the last half century.
Credit unions have had to diversify their sources of income in order to continue to exist, frankly. The 1971 business model would not allow you to exist today. That's just a reality of the market. The Income Tax Act has not kept up kept up with that. CRA continues to, in some cases, enforce a 53 year old definition, which disallows all sorts of revenues that credit unions earn, apart from just plain vanilla deposit and loan revenue from members, which is of course the historical and traditional way in which financial institutions earn revenue. If you want to exist today, you need to earn revenue in all sorts of different ways.
Eliminating that revenue test acknowledges that credit unions earn revenue in other ways, and will presumably, we hope, eliminate the negative tax consequences that have come with CRA interpreting and enforcing a 53-year-old definition in recent years.