Thank you very much for your question.
First, I should just clarify that when I said non-profits were eating away at their core assets, I meant that instead of investing in themselves, they stopped doing things that mainstream companies do because they were so hard pressed by the lack of access to capital or donations.
In terms of the needs, right now we know the profile of non-profit income is that at least one-third is already earned in some way or another, but the ways in which that is happening are very complicated.
I'll give you an example. I can't talk about it because they don't want to be talked about publicly, but there's a major charity that has a really successful social enterprise inside the charity. It basically recycles things, generates income for them, and keeps stuff that would go to landfill from going to the landfill. However, in order to do that, they violate the CRA rule, which was created at some time by somebody for some reason, that 90% of the labour going into the social enterprise has to be volunteer labour. There's an arbitrary rule that is basically undermining an organization that has a great social enterprise that seems to be working okay within the existing charity. They would need something like a CIC to have an alternative. If you're located in Ontario, there's an arcane rule that states you can't hold more than 10% of the shares of a business for a long period of time, so you couldn't even set it up as a subsidiary.
We have a patchwork quilt of charity and non-profit rules that were created a long time ago and don't really serve the modern needs of charities, and those charities are finding new ways to meet their missions. As a matter of fact, our rules for charities are based on the idea that they don't deal with root causes of things but with the symptoms of things, so what we're trying to do is empower charities to be able to move toward working on the root causes of things, such as training people so they can get jobs or whatever it is.
The innovative capacity of the sector is growing really quickly. I don't have a statistical way of telling you how big the market is, just that it's growing a lot. This week in Toronto the third national congress of social enterprises takes place. The first one had 200 people. The second one had 550 people. Going back now, it's six years, so the movement is growing a lot. Between that fact and what we know about the general numbers--a third of the income is earned--there would be a huge opportunity here.
How do I know they could raise capital? Well, that's basically the test that we see in the U.K. They have been able to raise capital. We see a growth in these companies. It basically opens the door to them to escape that zero-sum universe of the existing restricted pool of donations or government funding and be able to go out to mainstream capital and gain that.